In the presence of price distortions, cost-benefit analysis must include changes in the deadweight loss in addition to the direct benefits and costs to transportation users and nonusers. Advances in new economic geography (NEG) have highlighted the importance of price distortions associated with...

In this monograph several aspects of externalities in cities are analyzed using extensions of a standard residential land use model. Topics covered are optimal and market city sizes, local public goods, traffic congestion, externalities between different types of households, and the growth of a...

The land prices in Japan are abnormally high by international standards. Their adverse effects are intensely reflected in the inferior housing conditions in large cities. Especially in the large metropolitan regions, people are forced to live in small houses, which have been compared to "rabbit...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT), or the golden rule of local public finance, states that, in first-best economies, the fiscal surplus, defined as aggregate land rents minus aggregate losses from increasing returns to scale activities, is zero at optimal city sizes. We derive a general second-best...

Bringing together insights and perspectives from close to 70 of the world’s leading experts in the field, this timely Handbook provides an up-to-date guide to the most recent and state-of-the-art advances in transport economics. The comprehensive coverage includes topics such as the...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT) states that, in first-best economies, the fiscal surplus of a city government that finances the Pigouvian subsidies for agglomeration externalities and the costs of local public goods by a 100% tax on land is zero at optimal city sizes. We extend the HGT to...

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...