The paper is concerned with the formation of polycentric cities. The model we introduce includes two types of developers and planning authorities. Developers’ characteristics, such as scale of operations, availability of own-capital and time preferences lead to various decisions concerning the...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

This paper studies the causal effect of transport infrastructure on the spatial concentration of economic activity. Leveraging a new global dataset of geo-located Chinese government-financed projects over the period from 2000 to 2014 together with measures of spatial inequality based on...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural–urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural–urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an...

In this article, the question of the location of exporters of manufactured goods within a country is investigated. Data from 354 magisterial districts in South Africa are used with a variety of estimators to identify the determinants of regional manufactured exports. It is found that the...

This short article discusses urban redevelopment, and its relation to economic productivity and various concepts of well being. It notes that solutions adopted in one era are apt to be the problems of the next. The article then introduces the four articles comprising the George Mason Law Review...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap'' suggests that labor is greatly...