Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

We show in the framework of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous and productivity depends on the quality of the match between job and worker, trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-industry trade. The agglomeration force is the improvement...

We show in the context of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-regional trade. Labor heterogeneity gives local monopoly power to firms but also introduces variations in the quality of the job match....

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

European regions have experienced a polarisation of their unemployment rates between 1986 and 1996, as regions with intermediate rates have been driven by changes in regional employment, only partly offset by labour force changes. Regions'' outcomes have closely followed those of neighbouring...

This paper analyses patterns of production across 14 industries in 45 regions from 7 European countries since 1975. We estimate a structural equation derived directly from Heckscher- Ohlin theory that relates an industry’s share of a region’s GDP to factor endowments and relative prices....

Foregone benefits of the open space that is sacrificed through urban sprawl are hard to quantify. We obtain a simple benchmark measure by introducing a demand for trips beyond the urban boundary into the monocentric city model. The externality arises from the increase in travel costs that...

Does brownfield redevelopment warrant government support? We explore several external benefits in an urban general equilibrium framework. Preferences are modelled such that demand for housing units in the city is downward sloping, which yields a more general setup than the extreme open and...

This paper investigates whether the geographic distribution of manufacturing activities depends on the size of plants. Using Italian data, we find, as in Kim [Kim, S., 1995. Expansion of markets and the geographic concentration of economic activities: the trends in U.S. regional manufacturing...

Empirical papers studying the effects of neighbourhood characteristics on socio-economic variables have predominantly used US data. We argue that the local nature of the US schooling system means that neighbourhood effects on education decisions may act through fiscal or social channels. We use...