Recent research into the urban quality of life (QOL) is reviewed and analyzed, with a special emphasis on the estimation of implicit prices of environmental attributes. New work has incorporated traditional concerns of urban theory into QOL analyses, as well as increased our understanding of...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first one, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution...

We review the theoretical links between growth and agglomeration. Growth, in the form of innovation, can be at the origin of catastrophic spatial agglomeration in a cumulative process a la Myrdal. One of the surprising features of the Krugman [Journal of Political Economy 99 (1991) 483-499]...

In this chapter we look at the spatial distribution of economic activities in China and Japan. Japan has excellent data and relatively uniform institutions since World War II, which allow us to track its spatial evolution and detail its key features today. For Japan we show how structural shifts...

In this chapter we discuss the data sources and methods available for studying the spatial distribution of economic activity in North America. We document facts about the specialization of states and regions, as well as locations differentiated by their degree of urbanization. We also report...

What is the effect of an increase in the overall level of human capital on the economy of a city? Although much is known about the private return to education, much less is known about the more important question of what happens to productivity, wages and land prices when the aggregate stock of...