Since the beginning of the 90's the New Economic Geography (NEG) has been a theoretical reference for several researches on regional and urban economics. The main task of this paper is to present a critical assessment of the NEG approach, which has in the book The Spatial Economy, by M.Fujita,...

"The Spatial Economy Cities, Regions and International Trade", by Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman and Anthony J. Venables, has been seen as the best synthesis of the so-called new economic geography. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to review the book; and second, to place it in the...

This paper analyses the methodology developed by Behrens and Murata (2007) to introduce variable mark-ups into models of monopolistic competition. Their risk- aversion explanation to the presence of ¯xed mark-ups in the Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) model is validated; however, we show that their...

This paper analyses the methodology developed by Behrens and Murata (2007) to introduce variable mark-ups into models of monopolistic competition. Their risk- aversion explanation to the presence of ¯xed mark-ups in the Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) model is validated; however, we show that their...

This paper examines the agglomeration benefits of a transportation improvement in a city by modeling the microstructure of urban agglomeration based on monopolistic competition of differentiated intermediate products. Properly extended to include variety distortion in addition to price...

During the 19th century, the Spanish economy went through the early stages of the industrialisation process. This process developed in parallel to the growing market integration of goods and factors as a result of the liberal reforms and the construction of the railway network, with the...

During the 19th century, the Spanish economy went through the early stages of the industrialisation process. This process developed in parallel to the growing market integration of goods and factors as a result of the liberal reforms and the construction of the railway network, with the...

The distribution of the population of cities has attracted a great deal of attention, in part because it sharply constrains models of local growth. However, to this day, there is no consensus on the distribution below the very upper tail, because available data need to rely on the "legal" rather...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in...

We establish that the debate between Eeckhout (2004; 2009) and Levy (2009) has still not resolved the key issue of whether the distribution of large US urban places in 2000 is consistent with a lognormal for the intire size range. We resolve this by introducing a new distribution function which...