In this chapter we look at the spatial distribution of economic activities in China and Japan. Japan has excellent data and relatively uniform institutions since World War II, which allow us to track its spatial evolution and detail its key features today. For Japan we show how structural shifts...

The share of urban population in Brazil has increased from 58 to 80 percent between 1970 and 2000 and all net population growth over the next thirty years is predicted to be in cities. This paper explores population growth and its implications for economic dynamics and income generation among...

TIn this paper, we examine the determinants of Brazilian city growth between 1970 and 2000. We consider a model of a city, which combines aspects of standard urban economics and the new economic geography literatures. For the empirical analysis, we constructed a dataset of 123 Brazilian...

This paper models and estimates net urban agglomeration economies for cities. Economic models of cities postulate an inverted U shape of real income per worker against city employment, where the inverted U shifts with industrial composition across the urban hierarchy of cities. This relationship...

This paper studies the advertising agency industry in Manhattan to infer networking benefits among agencies in close spatial proximity. We use economic census data that allow us to distinguish locations at a fine level of geographic detail, so as to infer the strong effect on productivity of...