Since globalisation accelerated in the early 1990s, income inequality has increased in most developed countries and in some middle-income countries, including China and India. Also, inequality has declined in most countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and in many Sub-Saharan African and...

This paper studies the hypothesis of an inverted-U-shaped relationship between spatial inequality and economic development. The theory of Kuznets (1955) and Williamson (1965) suggests that (spatial) inequality first increases in the process of development, then peaks, and then decreases. To test...

We study the effect of spatial inequality on economic activity. Given that the relationship is highly simultaneous in nature, we use exogenous variation in geographic features to construct an instrument for spatial inequality, which is independent from any man-made factors. Inequality measures...

Demographic change brings complex challenges to the economic, social, and environmental systems of cities, with its asymmetric, overlapping, and compounded impacts across people and places. This paper analyses the main demographic trends and challenges in cities across OECD countries, with a...

What accounts for the growth of US top income inequality? This paper proposes a hierarchical redistribution hypothesis. The idea is that US firms have systematically redistributed income to the top of the corporate hierarchy. I test this hypothesis using a large scale hierarchy model of the US...

The contribution of this paper is to explain how to achieve a universally prosperous environmentally sustainable global society. This objective is incompatible with traditional economic policies dependent on environmentally exploitive growth in the population and/or full employment to generate...

Trade costs are a crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

Trade costs are crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...