We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although as widely recognised attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is not because urban environments disadvantage pupils, but because the most...

Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from...

This paper investigates certain issues of economic and ethnic segregation from the perspective of children in the three metropolitan regions of Sweden by using a relative new operationalization of the neighbourhood concept. Neighbourhoods are clustered by population share of visible immigrants...

This paper takes a fresh look at child poverty at the neighbourhood level in the three metropolitan regions of Sweden using unique data for 1990, 1996 and 2002. We find that the number of neighbourhoods with high child poverty rates is much larger in 2002 than in 1990, but also that most poor...

This paper studies gross worker flows to explain the rising informality in Brazilian metropolitan labor markets from 1983-2002. This period covers two economic cycles, several stabilization plans, a far-reaching trade liberalization, and changes in labor legislation through the Constitutional...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

The paper looks at the effects of employment concentration on resource allocation with a particular focus on one-company towns in Russia defined as towns where a single company accounts for a significant share of total employment of the locality. Empirical analysis of firms' production functions...

This paper studies the social desirability of agglomeration and the efficiency arguments for policy intervention in a simple, analytically solvable ?new economic geography? model with two trade integrating regions. The location pattern emerging as market equilibrium is ?bubbleshaped?, i.e. it...

Theory predicts that the majoritarian electoral system should produce more targeted redistribution and lower politicians' rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using micro data for the mixed-member Italian House of Representatives, which allow us to sidestep the...

This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially-targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood...