We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent...

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly...

This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong over-representation of workers with particularly high and low skills...

We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) in US cities. We find that VKT increases proportionately to highways and identify three important sources for this extra VKT: an increase in driving by current residents; an increase in...

This paper complements the results of earlier work on factor misallocation. The paper first expands the methodology and provides two important decompositions for the main indices. The main result is that factor and output misallocation across districts is at least as important as misallocation...

Growing research and policy interest focuses on the misallocation of output and factors of production in developing economies. This paper considers the possible misallocation of financial loans. Using plant-level data on the organized and unorganized sectors, the paper describes the temporal,...

This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by...

We develop a methodology to estimate robust city level vehicular mobility indices, and apply it to 154 Indian cities using 22 million counterfactual trips measured by a web mapping service. There is wide variation in mobility across cities. An exact decomposition shows this variation is driven...

We propose a new nonparametric approach to estimate the production function for housing. Our estimation treats output as a latent variable and relies on the first order condition for profit maximisation with respect to nonland inputs by competitive house builders. For parcels of a given size, we...

This special issue contains papers by both economists and geographers on agglomeration and growth. In this introduction, we first provide a brief sketch of recent developments in the interaction between economists and geographers. We then propose some contextual background to make it easier for...