This paper establishes a simple theoretical framework which comprises key forces that shape the structure and interrelation of cities to study the interdependencies between urban evolution and the environment. We focus on the potential of the unfettered market forces to economize on emissions. A...

We study environmental pollution in an economic geography framework with two cities, where pollution arises from commuting within cities, goods transport between cities, production of manufacturing and agricultural goods, and residential energy use. We find that city size has an ambiguous effect...

The paper combines an economic-geography model of agglomeration and periphery with a model of species diversity and looks at optimal policies of biodiversity conservation. The subject of the paper is natural biodiversity, which is inevitably impaired by anthropogenic impact. Thus, the economic...

The literature on the wage curve provides considerable evidence in favor of a negative relationship between unemployment and wages. It is thus often seen as a refutation of the Harris-Todaro model, who point to a positive relationship. This paper shows that both strands of literature are special...

This paper analyzes the effect of skill heterogeneity on regional patterns of production and housing in the presence of pecuniary externalities within a general-equilibrium framework, assuming monopolistic competition in intermediate goods markets. It shows that the interplay of heterogeneous...

Germany like many other European countries subsidize commuting by granting the right to deduct commuting expenses from the income tax base. This regulation has often been changed and has regularly been under debate during the last decades. The pros (e.g. causing efficiency gains with respect to...

Sustainable use of natural resources becomes an important issue today not only due to global warming and pollution issues but also because of critical pressure on the Earth's regeneration possibility. We cannot use classical microeconomic approach here for two reasons: a) impossibility to create...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

For a complete cost-benefit analysis of durable infrastructures, it is important to understand how the value of non-market goods such as transit time and environmental quality changes as incomes rise in the long-run. We use difference-in-differences and spatial differencing to estimate the land...

Households in real cities are heterogeneous regarding their size and composition. An aspect usually neglected in urban models used to study economic and policy issues that arise in today's cities. We develop an urban general equilibrium model that takes a more complex household structure...