Daytime population density reflects where people commute and spend their waking hours. It carries significant weight as urban planners and engineers site transportation infrastructure and utilities, plan for disaster recovery, and assess urban vitality. Various methods with various drawbacks...

Airport cities – concentrations of employment – may have emerged near the major airports of large metropolitan areas. As the U.S. economy is nearly three times as air-intensive as it was in the 1950s, the “aerotropolis” thesis holds that airport cities are a direct consequence of...

Airport area planning founders on the lack of a basis for realistic projections of future employment. Using a commercial establishment database including detailed data on location, activities (sector), establishment type, and employment for the 62 airports with scheduled passenger service in the...

This chapter surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multiregion model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation...

We investigate the heterogeneity in the long-run effects of two colonial roads in Brazil. These roads connected the coast to a thriving gold mining region in the highlands. The oldest of the two roads was heavily used at the beginning of the gold rush, but tax collection concerns led colonial...

Accessibility is a key factor in the utility from living in different areas. In urban models, accessibility is theoretically expected to be internalized by the residential market, creating an 'accessibility premium' in areas with better accessibility. Previous case-study literature found...

This Inquiry final report brings together three separate research projects to examine the capacity of Australia’s smaller cities to assist in managing population growth, including international and national migration; and provides advice on which policy instruments and programs are most likely...

What determines the spatial distribution of economic activity? And why is economic activity sometimes "lumpy", distributed in a core-periphery pattern in some countries? This paper uses new sub regional data on the spatial distribution of economic activity for a large cross section of countries,...

This paper analyses the relationship between firms’ multi-factor productivity and the effective employment density of the areas where they operate. Quantifying these agglomeration elasticities is of central importance in the evaluation of the wider economic benefits of transport investments....

This paper uses city-level data to examine the impact of a first wave of railroad construction in Sweden, between 1855 and 1870, from the 19th century until today. We estimate that railroads accounted for 50% of urban growth, 1855-1870. In cities with access to the railroad network, property...