Urban concentration differs across countries. One determinant of these differences is economic development, which first increases and subsequently decreases urban concentration. I condition the degree of urban concentration on the potential of countries to develop a balanced urban system. These...

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...

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...

This article describes the development of international trade blocs world wide from the 1950s till 2010. We updated the data on international trade flows and introduced a new trade bloc variable based on the intramax hierarchical clustering technique, which defines trade blocs on actual trade...

This research is interested to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on different stock markets globally. Therefore, we propose a new simulator that is entitled “The Massive Pandemic Contagious Diseases Damage on Stock Markets Simulator (φ-Simulator).” The main objective is to evaluate from a...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

We present a new model on the impact of terrorism on the Deglobalization process. The channels are faster poverty expansion, largest flows of refugees, expansion of trade protectionism, and last but not least, the dramatic expansion of economic desgrowth. This new model is entitled “The...

We study the impact of international long-distance flights on the global spatial allocation of economic activity. To identify causal effects, we exploit variation due to regulatory and technological constraints which give rise to a discontinuity in connectedness between cities at a distance of...

Technological innovation is a vital human activity that interacts with geographic factors and the natural environment. The purpose of the present study is to explain the relationship between climate zones and innovative outputs in order to detect factors that can spur technological change and,...

We propose an innovative methodology to measure inequality between cities. If an even distribution of amenities across cities is assumed to increase the average well-being in a given country, inequality between cities can be evaluated through a multidimensional index of the Atkinson (1970) type....