In this paper the impact of various agglomerative forces on employment growth in Ghanaian manufacturing is investigated, using data from two firm censuses, as well as population census and trade data. The study is the first to use nationally representative firm data that covers the formal and...

For a long time, the urbanization and development discourse has coincided with a focus on economic growth and big cities. Yet, much of the world's new urbanization is taking place in smaller urban entities (towns), and the composition of urbanization may well bear on the speed of poverty...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of institutional fragmentation and metropolitan coordination on urban productivity in Latin American cities. The use of night-time lights satellite imagery and high-resolution population data allow the use of a broader definition of...

The impact of urban form on economic performance and quality of life has been extensively recognized. The studies on urban form have focused in developed countries; only a few cities in developing countries have been studied. This paper utilizes nighttime lights imagery and information on street...

A large literature documents the positive influence of a city's skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city's age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. This paper hypothesizes that cities with more...

Agglomeration boosts economic growth. A vast literature has empirically assessed the effects of agglomeration by estimating the city population elasticity on wages. This conventional approach is not necessarily suitable for analyzing urbanization at the early stage in developing countries, where...

Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial...