How should urban containment and the diversion of households to nearby residential areas be evaluated from a welfare economic perspective? Assuming the existence of a negative externality of city size, we develop a concise general equilibrium model for a mother city and a satellite. This...

We examine the effect of railway travel on urban spatial structure in a polycentric urban land use model. We focus on the role of access to the railway network. We find that if the number of train stations is limited, the degree of urbanization is higher around train stations, but the effect of...

Markets for complex, multi-faceted goods normally require a complex institutional framework to function properly, i.e., to lead to patterns of outcomes that are deemed acceptable by the individuals involved. This paper examines the institutional underpinnings of the market for urban land use...

Infrastructure and especially mass transit play a major role in urban economics and are the centre of many research questions. Probably due to simultaneous determination of infrastructure supply and demand most research is only carried out on the supply side driven relationship explaining how...

The Chinese government has been using annual quotas to control the amount of farm-land that can be converted for urban uses in cities. Using a sample of more than 1.5 million land-lease transactions during 2007-2016, we document facts on land conversion for urban development in China. We present...

We provide a full characterisation of the socially optimal allocation of urban land to households and firms in a long narrow city with centrally located amenities. Households support linear costs of commuting to their workplace, and linear costs of travelling to the centre to benefit from...

In this work, we present a gridded dataset about land cover, population density, real estate, and transportation in 192 worldwide urban areas representing together 800 million people. While population density and land cover are secondary data extracted from the GHS-POP and the ESA CCI databases...

Building on the OECD’s Better Life Initiative and new work using geospatial analysis, this paper investigates how reported life satisfaction relates to some of the urban structure indicators. To this end, it merges OECD household survey data with urban structure data from OECD’s Metropolitan...