In 2015, Germany welcomed close to one million asylum seekers and refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, the Western Balkans and elsewhere. Although the country was often praised for its welcome culture, the inflow has spurred a debate about identity, social cohesion and the limits of...

After the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish conflict, 1.2 million Greek Orthodox were forcibly displaced from Turkey to Greece, increasing the host population by 20 percent within a few months. Refugees were pro-vided with farmland, new houses and schools, and were granted the Greek citizenship. This...

The author focuses on how urban policies and the clustering of creative industries has influenced urban outcomes. The set of creative industries include those with output protectable under some form of intellectual property law. More specifically, this sub-sector encompasses software,...

Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of inter-city transport costs in determining the income of Sub-Saharan African cities, using two new data sources....

In the past dozen years, a literature has developed arguing that urbanization has unfolded differently in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the developing world, with implications for African economic growth overall. While African countries are more urbanized than other...

Which cities have the highest risk of human and economic losses due to natural hazards? And how will urban exposure to major hazards change over the coming decades? This paper develops a global urban disaster risk index that evaluates the mortality and economic risks from disasters in 1,943...

This paper analyzes real estate market dynamics over the past decade in the city of Ahmedabad, India, with a view to improving the living conditions of the large population living in slums. The paper combines census data, the National Sample Survey, and slum household surveys to review the...

Around the world, in both developed and developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment. Government officials have three main concerns in terms of land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii) providing infrastructure,...

The authors contribute to the field of urban governance and globalization through an empirically-based exploration of determinants of the performance of cities. They construct a preliminary worldwide database for cities, containing variables and indicators of globalization (at the country and...

Over the medium time horizon, skill upgrading, differentials in sectoral technological progress, and migration of labor out of farming activities are some of the major structural adjustment factors shaping the evolution of an economy and its connected poverty trends. The main focus of the...