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...

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are used for inputting, storing, managing, analysing and mapping spatial data. This article argues that each of these functions can help researchers interested in spatial economics. In addition, GIS provide access to new data which is both interesting in...

We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 û 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of city sizes and growth rates, conditional on various measures of market...

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 combines establishment level production data with international trade data by port to examine the impact of accession to the EEC on the spatial distribution of UK manufacturing. We use this data to test the predictions from economic geography models of how external trade affects the...

We consider the literatures on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework to compare the two approaches. We then use this framework to study a number...

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...

This paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets. Using English data at the Local Authority level for 2003–2007 we find that public sector employment has no identifiable effect on total private sector employment. However, public sector employment does affect...