Which of Germanys regions is the most attractive? Where is it best to live and work - on objective grounds? These questions are summed up in the concept quality of life. This paper uses recent research projects that determine this parameter to examine the spatial distribution of quality of life...

Urban policy visibly molds city shape. This paper's interest is in how city shape (less visibly) molds urban policy. The paper finds: A sufficiently skewed city will look after its center. That is, the more skewed a city's shape towards the city periphery, the more likely an urban majority...

Over the last decade or so, the debate on the planning and development of the Paris (Île-de-France) region has revolved around two little words: "Grand Paris", or Greater Paris. Despite existing political and scientific controversies surrounding the future of the capital region, three major...

In estimating agglomeration benefits across five OECD countries, this paper represents the first empirical analysis that contrasts cross-country evidence on agglomeration benefits with the productivity impact of metropolitan governance structures, while taking into account the potential sorting...

This book explores the relationship between families, firms, and regions and the extent to which these relationships contribute to regional economic and social development. Although family business participation in economic activities has been a common phenomenon since pre-industrial societies,...

Municipal break-ups are an understudied phenomenon despite the fact that such territorial reforms regularly take place across the globe. This paper estimates how seven voluntary splits of Swedish municipalities affected municipal current costs. To predict what would have happened had the...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. This reflects the fact that these models rely heavily on specific...

Which of Germanys regions is the most attractive? Where is it best to live and work - on objective grounds? These questions are summed up in the concept "quality of life". This paper uses recent research projects that determine this parameter to examine the spatial distribution of quality of...

This paper estimates agglomeration benefits based on city productivity differentials across five OECD countries (Germany, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States). It highlights the relationship between cities’ governmental fragmentation and productivity, and represents the first...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states. In particular, this is the case when we use the variation induced by the exogenous location of a state's centroid to instrument for the concentration of population around the capital...