This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

The paper describes a spatial economic agent-based model (ABM), consistent with the principles of new economic geography (NEG), which allows the discrete-time evolutionary simulation of complex interactions of household and firm location choices. In contrast with the current ABM approaches, it...

As research indicates a gap between complex scientific measures of accessibility and simpler proxies used by firms, this paper analyses the impact of several market access indicators on the location decision of firms. It compares the role of inter- and intra-industry agglomeration as proxies of...

In population declining countries, public services in rural areas face potential problematic issues on the long-run sustainability, which are namely brought by insufficient economies of scale. Since these services play important roles as social infrastructure elements, a disappearance from the...

There is a wide consensus among international institutions and national governments in favor of compact (i.e. densely populated) cities as a way to improve the ecological performance of the transport system. Indeed, when both the intercity and intra-urban distributions of activities are given, a...

This paper explores how the interaction between firm heterogeneity, urban costs and transport costs determines spatial configuration across regions within a simple general-equilibrium model. We spot light on how firm heterogeneity affects the centrifugal and centripetal forces and reshapes the...

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...