Explaining the growth and change of regions and cities is one of the great challenges for social science. The field of economic geography and associated economics has developed frameworks in recent years that, while tackling major questions in spatial economic development, are deficient in their...

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...

The size distribution of cities in many countries follows some broadly regular patterns. Any good theory of city size distributions should (i) be able to account for this regularity, but also (ii) rely on a plausible economic mechanism and (iii) be consistent with other fundamental features of...

This article analyses the geography of innovation in China and India. Using a tailor-made panel database for regions in these two countries, we show that both countries exhibit increasingly strong polarization of innovative capacity in a limited number of urban areas. But the factors behind this...

Transport infrastructure has represented one of the cornerstones of development and cohesion strategies in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere in the world. However, despite the considerable funds devoted to it, its impact remains controversial. This paper revisits the question of to what...

Debates about urban growth and change often center on specialization.However, arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be highly specialized or diversified? Does specialization refer to the absolute...

While it is now accepted that the 2008-09 recession accentuated regional differences in Britain, it is more difficult to identify the role of major cities, especially over a longer time scale. Using previously established methods focussed on employment, this paper assesses the record of nine...

A stylized fact of US inflation dynamics is one of extreme persistence and possible unit root behavior. If so, the implications for macroeconomics and monetary policy are somewhat unpalatable. Our econometric analysis proposes a parsimonious representation of the inflation process, the nonlinear...

The convergence hypothesis has generated a huge empirical literature: this paper critically reviews some of the earlier key ndings, claries their implications, and relates them to more recent results. Particular atten- tion is devoted to interpreting convergence empirics. The main ndings are:...

This paper uses data on a sample of Australian teenagers to test for neighbourhood effects on school dropout rates. The data allows us to test for neighbourhood effects at two different spatial scales. We find that educational composition of the larger neighbourhood can influence the dropout...