This paper examines whether population shrinkage leads to changes in the urban hierarchy in terms of relative sizes of cities and their functions onomic geography. We work backwards in a racetrack economy with eight cities in a long-run equilibrium. Initial distribution of population is chosen...

This paper explores the role of retailers as an urban amenity. Using data for Swedish rural and city municipalities for 2002-2008, "accessibility to shops" measures are constructed for the shops in the municipalities and in the hosting regions separately to examine the relationship between...

This paper investigates the determinants of the productivity of independent retail stores in Sweden by focusing on the impact of market size and regional hierarchy while controlling for several store and employee characteristics over time. The analysis utilizes Swedish store-level data for the...