This paper reconsiders the evolution of the growth of American cities since 1790 in the light of new theories of urban growth. Our null hypothesis for long-term growth is random growth. We obtain evidence supporting random growth against the alternative of mean reversion (convergence) in city...

This article analyzes the main existing theories on income and population city growth: the existence of increasing returns to scale, the importance of locational fundamentals, and random growth. To do this we develop a nonlinearity test that is implemented to a dataset on urban, climatological...

Growth economists still face challenges and limitations to incorporate institutions into the standard growth framework. This article develops a simple augmented Solow growth model that accounts for the interactions between institutions and factor-productivity and examine the impacts of the...

Regional convergence has spurred one of the most debatable topics in contemporary research in economics and one of the most critical issues from a policy perspective. In this paper, the intention is to augment the literature on regional convergence in Europe using the agricultural sector as a...

The paper present the analysis outcomes on the catching-up process. Additionally it seeks for identifying the “convergence clubs” in cross-national section. It implements a traditional analysis of convergence tracking the catching-up process as well as the per capita income dynamics across...

Whether urbanization economies are caused by urban diversity or urban scale is not clear in regional and urban economics literature. Many empirical studies have used either city population size or urban industrial diversity to measure urbanization economies and have reached different...

In this monograph several aspects of externalities in cities are analyzed using extensions of a standard residential land use model. Topics covered are optimal and market city sizes, local public goods, traffic congestion, externalities between different types of households, and the growth of a...

This paper uses un-truncated city population data from six countries (the United States, Spain, Italy, France, England and Japan) to illustrate how parametric growth regressions can lead to biased results when testing for Gibrat’s law in city size distributions. The OLS results show...

I begin with a rough sketch of the incidence of the cultural economy in US cities today. I then offer a brief review of some theoretical approaches to the question of creativity, with special reference to issues of social and geographic context. The city is a powerful fountainhead of creativity,...

After the intense and unprecedented urbanisation of the last centuries, it is more than evident that a clear understanding of the ongoing trends of urban growth and clustering is needed if we are to aim for a better insight as to their possible future. The main aim of this paper is the...