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...

Substantial attention has been given to the stylized fact that workforce education level tends to increase with city size. This paper demonstrates that the positive relation between city size and skill intensity is a spurious result due to the omission of housing cost, which increases with city...

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...

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 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....

This paper studies how the changing geographic distribution of skilled workers in the US affects theoretical models that use Gibrat's law to explain the size distribution of cities. In the empirical literature, a divergence hypothesis holds that college share increases faster in cities where...

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...

We study the optimal and equilibrium size of cities in a city system model with environmental pollution. Pollution is related to city size through the effect of population on production, commuting, and housing consumption. With symmetric cities, if pollution is local or per capita pollution...

In this paper, we put forth the view that the potential for urbanisation economies increases with interaction opportunities. On the basis of that premise, three properties are key to an agglomeration index, which should: (i) increase with the concentration of population and conform to the...

We contrast evidence of urban path dependence with efforts to analyze calibrated models of city sizes. Recent evidence of persistent city sizes following the obsolescence of historical advantages suggests that path dependence cannot be understood as the medium-run effect of legacy capital but...