Over the last decade, many researchers have focused on the study of different urban hierarchies and their evolution over time. These studies may or may not confirm Zipf’s law and emphasize the characteristics of urban growth. The question is then whether urban growth depends upon city-size or...

La mesure des disparités régionales dans l’Union européenne a été largement abordée dans la littérature, notamment grâce à l’utilisation de modèles de convergence la plupart du temps basés sur des spécifications néo-classiques. Plus récemment, certains travaux ont mis en...

This article aims at analyzing the economic impact of a particular category of the population, the retirees, on the development of rural areas. A great number of them are indeed confronted with the presence or the arrival of retirees, whose impact has seldom been assessed in France. However, the...

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of the convergence process between 145 European regions over the period 1980-1999. In that purpose, we use the formal tools of spatial econometrics to identify and include the relevant spatial effects in the estimation of the appropriate conditional...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the regional disparities of the literacy rates of the gender in Tunisia according to the latest population census of 2004. A spatial econometric model shows that different socio-economic factors appear particularly explain the literacy rates of the Tunisian...

Econometric estimations of the impact of structural funds on the growth process of the European regions started 9 years ago. However, it is striking to realize that all previous estimations in this field are based on some form of the neoclassical growth model. This model is still widely used...

Many kinds of data in the social sciences have a hierarchical, multilevel or clustered structure. For example, municipalities are grouped into regions; regions are formed within countries; and quite often, countries belong to supra-national organizations. Once groupings are established, they...

In this study, a spatial equilibrium model of employment growth is developed and empirically estimated by Generalized Spatial Two-Stage Least Squares (GS2SLS) estimator using cross-sectional data from Appalachian counties for 1990-2000. Besides the existence of spatial spillover effects, the...

Heterogeneity is one of the distinguishing features in spatial econometric models. It is a frequent problem in applied work and can be very damaging for statistical inference. In this paper, we focus on the problems implied by the existence of instabilities in the mechanism of spatial dependence...

Local wage variations in the UK are explained by two non-nested rival hypotheses. The first derives from new economic geography theory, in which wages depend on market access. The second come from urban economics theory, giving a reduced form with wage rates dependent on employment density. The...