We study environmental pollution in an economic geography framework with two cities, where pollution arises from commuting within cities, goods transport between cities, production of manufacturing and agricultural goods, and residential energy use. We find that city size has an ambiguous effect...

This paper aims to study the effect of a major historical event on the Spanish city size distribution, the Spanish Reconquista. This was a long military campaign that aimed to expel Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The process started in the early 1300s and ended around 1500, when the entire...

This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show...

In this paper, we develop a new theoretical model that explains the forest transition not at a local, but at a worldwide level, in a trade liberalisation scenario. Our model has economic geography foundations: transport costs affect the distribution of firms between countries. We also introduce...

This paper analyses the evolution of the size distribution of the stock of emigrants in the period 1960-2000. Has the distribution of the stock of emigrants changed or has there been some convergence? This is the question discussed in this work. In particular, we are interested in testing the...

If the population of a given country evolves according to Gibrat'�s Law, its growth rate will be independent of its initial size. This short paper further investigates this empirical regularity by the application of a suitable panel unit root test and non-parametric methods. The evidence...

This paper analyses the determinants of growth of American cities, understood as growth of the population or per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all cities with no size restriction (our sample contains data for 21,655 cities). The results show that while...

The aim of this paper is to analyse, through a theoretical model, the effects that the trade integration of two countries may have on industrial location, growth and welfare. The conclusions reached finally depend both on whether the import or the export costs are affected by the trade policies...

In this paper we present a model integrating characteristics of the New Economic Geography, the theory of endogenous growth and the economy of natural resources. This theoretical framework enables us to study explicitly the effect of “first nature causes” in the concentration of economic...

This paper reconsiders the evolution of the growth of American cities since 1790 in the light of new theories of urban growth. Our null hypothesis for long-term growth is random growth. We obtain evidence supporting random growth against the alternative of mean reversion (convergence) in city...