Abstract New Economic Geography presents increasing returns to agglomeration as a central explanation for concentration of economic activity. The estimation of the size of these effects remains, however, a standing issue in the field. The focus of this study is to investigate the presence of...

New Economic Geography presents increasing returns to agglomeration as the central explanation behind the concentration of economic activity. Within this framework, returns to scale are caused by a preference for variety in consumption which is better satisfied by agglomeration. The estimation...

This paper extends the Puga (1999) model by introducing urban frictions. It assumes that the agglomeration of manufacturing in a city imposes a cost on the inhabitants of the agglomerated region. Furthermore, an implicit function methodology is developed to provide a numerical stability function...

This paper attempts to model directly the "folk theorem" of spatial economics, according to which increasing returns to scale are essential for understanding the geographical distributions of activity. The model uses the simple structure of most New Economic Geography papers, with two identical...

An information-theoretic thought experiment is developed to clarify why the maximum entropy methodology is appropriate for predicting the equilibrium state of economic systems. As a first step, object allocation problems, modeled as knapsack problems, are shown to be equivalent to congestion...

Face au ralentissement des ventes de véhicules, le « Pacte automobile » mobilise 9 milliards d’euros pour venir en aide aux constructeurs français. L’enjeu est triple : soutenir à court terme la demande et l’emploi, assurer l’avenir d’une industrie stratégique au regard des...

The maximum entropy methodology is applied to the Schelling model of urban segregation in order to obtain a reliable prediction of the stable configuration of the system without resorting to numerical simulations. We show that this approach also provides an implicit equation describing the...