This paper focuses on the decomposition of location measures according to a twofold geographical level of analysis. The methodology, based on the use of the Theil dissimilarity index, is potentially applicable to the assessment of the spatial distribution of several economic phenomena when...

We revisit the role of Capital Fundamentalism, in the context of the Government of Indonesia's Inpres Desa Tertinggal (IDT or Left Behind Village) Program, which injected capital into poor village economies. We evaluate the impact of the program on village welfare and structural transformation...

This paper proposes and empirically validates four theories of why legal origin influences growth and welfare through finance. It is a natural extension of "Law and finance: why does legal origin matter?" by Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt and Ross Levine (2003). We find only partial support...

We consider a microfounded urban growth model with two regions and a mass of mobile workers to study interactions among growth, agglomeration, and urban congestion. Unlike previous research in the urban growth literature, we formulate the model as a one-shot game and take an evolutionary...

We analyze the impact of preference matching and income on the distribution of the population in an aggregate economy consisting of an urban and an adjacent rural region. It costs more (less) to live in the urban (rural) region. Individuals choose freely to live either in the urban or in the...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...

A common challenge in analyzing urbanization is the data. The United Nations (UN) compiles information on urbanization (urban population and its share of total national population) that is reported by various countries but there is no standardized definition of 'urban' resulting in...

We analyze the efficiency of urbanization patterns in a stylized dynamic model of urban growth with three sectors of production. Pollution, as a force that discourages agglomeration, is caused by domestic production. We show that cities are too large and too few in number in uncoordinated...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...