The question regarding the effects of changing transports costs on the size distribution of cities is an important topic of systems of cities research. The so-called New Economic Geography has already given some answers to this question. One central assumption in this kind of model is a very...

We study the role of: (i) initial differences in shares of immobile workers between countries which stand for the agglomeration forces, and (ii) positive trade costs in the traditional sector which are related to the dispersion forces, in shaping the spatial pattern of the developed and...

The core-periphery model by Krugman (1991) has two 'dramatic' implications: catastrophic agglomeration and locational hysteresis. We study this seminal model with CES instead of Cobb-Douglas upper tier preferences. This small generalization suffices to change these stark implications. For a wide...

The paper studies the Krugman's CP model in the weakly explored case of asymmetric regions in two settings: international trade and agglomeration processes. First setting implies that the industrial labor is immobile, while second one consider mobile industrial labor and long-run equilibria....

This paper tests directly a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan during different time periods. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log-linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold...

The notion of 'polycentric city system' is currently receiving growing attention as a basic element of the 'European Spatial Policy'. From this perspective, both agglomeration and economic integration have to be reinterpreted on a wider geographical scale. This is of interest of the s.c....

Modeling a micro-structure of agglomeration economies, this article derives a second-best benefit evaluation formula for urban transportation improvements. Without explicitly modeling the sources of agglomeration economies, Venables (JTEP 2007) investigated the same problem. This article...

The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

The last one and a half centuries have witnessed dramatic changes in the world economy. The service (tertiary) sector, which at the beginning of the 20th century was of little importance relative to agriculture and manufacturing, has become the dominant sector today, accounting for 80% and more...