The distribution of transport infrastructure across space is the outcome of deliberate government planning that reflects a desire to unlock the welfare gains from regional economic integration. Yet, despite being one of the oldest government activities, the economic forces shaping the endogenous...

Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these...

This paper proposes a simple method measuring spatial robustness of estimated coefficients and considers the role of administrative districts and regions' size. The procedure, dubbed "Grid and Shake", offers a solution for a practical empirical issue, when one compares a variables of interest...

We study the dynamics of inter-regional economic disparities for a number of development characteristics, test the hypothesis of the new economic geography and connect the results with the prediction of the bell curve describing spatial concentration over time. The results of our analysis...

Regional clusters and entrepreneurship have become very popular subjects in economics, regional science, and economic geography. In the last decade, a large number of scientific papers investigate the empirical evidence for clusters, their definition, and their implications for economic policy....

This paper endogenizes the spatial distribution of infrastructure investment and transportation costs. Transportation costs between two addresses depend on cumulative infrastructure investment. In a continuous space setting with several independent countries or regions, consumers demand domestic...