This note introduces the special issue on Well-being in cities and regions: measurement, analysis and policy practices. After highlighting the importance of well-being research, this contribution provides a rationale for focusing on the local level rather than looking at country averages for...

An increasing amount of empirical evidence documents that city-size distribution within a country follows a power law, often in the form of Zipf’s law. This paper provides new comparative evidence on city size distribution across OECD countries. It uses a database where urban agglomerations...

Contemporary urban systems in OECD countries are structured around functional regions, which often overcome established city boundaries. Reading space in terms of functional regions allows assessing changes in urban hierarchies and spatial structures, including the polycentricity of urban...

Metropolitan areas concentrate the main share of population, production and consumption in OECD countries. They are likely to be one of the most important units for economic, social and environmental analysis as well as for the development of policy strategies. However, one of the main problems...

The paper introduces a novel, granular house-price dataset sourced from a network of public and private data providers. It offers the first results of investigations into changes in the urban geography of housing markets following the COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid rise of working from home...

This paper assesses levels and distribution of household disposable income in OECD metropolitan areas. All indicators were produced through a dedicated data collection, which, for most countries, uses administrative data from tax records available at detailed local scale (i.e. municipalities,...