There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also diff er along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of almost 8,000 American cities, we fi nd that older cities in the US...

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. This reflects the fact that these models rely heavily on specific...

There is considerable variation in the skill composition of employment across cities and regions. The way how skill compositions evolve over time sheds light on the strength of concentration forces for high-skilled workers, such as localized increasing returns to human capital. In this paper I...

In this paper we show that the recent model by Gilles Duranton [Duranton, G., 2007. Urban evolutions: The fast, the slow, and the still. American Economic Review 97, 197-221] performs remarkably well in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simple rank-size...