Larger cities typically give rise to two opposite effects: tougher competition among firms and higher production costs. Using an urban model with substitutability of production factors and pro-competitive effects, I study the response of the market outcome to city size, land-use regulations, and...

In this paper we show that the double Pareto lognormal (DPLN) parameterization provides an excellent fit to the overall US city size distribution, regardless of whether "cities" are administratively defined Census places or economically defined area clusters. We then consider an economic model...

Exploiting the cascade structure of cities and based on a dataset for U.S. cities between 1840 and 2016, the aim of this short paper is to answer three important questions: First, do we observe that the U.S. city size distribution exhibits a smooth transition to Zipf's law from the beginning or...

Hosting a mega-event is a costly activity of short duration. Still, cities frequently compete to become host of all types of events. This paper examines the effect of staging the largest and most important sporting event in the world, the Summer Olympic Games, on the host city. Applying a...

In what sense are institutions a deep determinant of growth? In this paper, we address this question by examining the relationship between city growth and institutional reform in 19th century Germany, when some cities experienced deep institutional reform as a result of French rule. Employing an...

This study uses a large firm-level data set covering more than 80 countries to explore the effects of firm-size, city-size, and government-size on perceived and experienced corruption. Four points summarize our main findings, which seem instructive and new. First, there is a broad structural...

We study decentralized and optimal urbanization in a simple multi-sector model of a rural-urban economy focusing on productivity differences and internal trade frictions. We show that even in the absence of the typical externalities studied in the literature, such as agglomeration, congestion or...

Redistributive grants schemes, such as fiscal equalization, are a common characteristic of local public finance in several countries. However, large and small jurisdictions are treated differently by the respective fiscal equalization schemes that often tend to favour larger jurisdictions. This...

The paper deals with the question of whether fiscal transfers re-ceived by cities can be justified by a higher cost of producing publicly provided goods. In the model, increasing the population density implies both a higher output per capita due to agglomeration economies and a higher cost of...