The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this paper we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300-1861. The first contribution...

The potential effects of high-speed rail (HSR) reach into many overlapping fields of interest. This paper summarizes the evolution of HSR and elaborates on the development effects of the HSR transport infrastructure. HSR can simultaneously become a core component on desired urban developments,...

This paper summarizes and expands the state-of-the-art understanding of the urbanization, development, environment, and inequality nexus. Economic growth/development, urbanization, and energy/electricity consumption are all highly correlated. While urbanization may be more evidence of economic...

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...

With a self-constructed, unique historical data set for 240 counties that spans over centuries, this paper uses the ‘quasi-natural experiment' of capital relocation in 1421, during China's Ming Dynasty, as an exogenous shock to study the relationship between political governance and urban...

The People's Republic of China (PRC) is experiencing a trend toward population concentration in its large coastal cities. However, at the same time, there is also a distortion of city size toward small cities in the country. That is to say, the urban population in the PRC should further...

In the years since Michael Porter's paper about the potential competitiveness of inner cities there has been growing evidence of a residential resurgence in urban neighborhoods. Yet, there is less evidence on the competitiveness of inner cities for employment. We document the trends in net...

This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The dataset contains over 1,500 cities covering 43 economies of Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for Asia...

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this paper we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300-1861. The first contribution...