By 2050, the global population living in cities is projected to reach 5 billion, growing from 3.5 billion in 2015. Massive investment in infrastructure will be needed to accommodate this growth, and to adapt infrastructure to climate change and benefit from the digital transition. This report...

Ports and cities are historically strongly linked, but the link between port and city growth has become weaker. Economic benefits often spill over to other regions, whereas negative impacts are localised in the port-city. How can ports regain their role as drivers of urban economic growth and...

We examine the effect of enforcing minimum quality standards (MQSs) on consumer health. In the late 1800s, the urban milk supply was regularly skimmed and diluted with water, but consumers could not easily determine its quality because dyes, caramel, and salt were added. To protect consumers,...

We investigate the employment consequences of deindustrialization for 1,993 cities in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States. In all six countries we find a strong negative relationship between a city's share of manufacturing employment in the year of its country's...

We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city's subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. For the 632 largest cities in the world we construct panel data describing population, measures of centralization calculated from lights at night data, and the extent of...

Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant...

We examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth (income and population) between 1960 and 1990. Our major findings are that income and population growth move together and both types of growth are (1) positively related to initial schooling, (2) negatively...

This paper surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access as well as endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A...

Urban flooding poses danger to people and places. People can adapt to this risk by moving to safer areas or by investing in private self-protection. Places can offset some of the risk through urban planning and infrastructure investment. By constructing a global city data set that covers the...