We exploit administrative data on exact commuting distances for a large sample of German employees and study the relation of commuting and wages. We find that it requires 1.5 times as much money in terms of higher wages for job changers to accept an increase of their commute as compared to their...

Transport costs are a crucial element of any spatial economic model. Surprisingly, good transport cost estimates at a detailed spatial level for the EU are not readily available. In this paper we address this issue by estimating a novel dataset of road freight transport costs for goods for the...

This paper analyzes the growth of Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the PRC between 1992 and 2013 by focusing on the night-light radiance — a measure of economic activity — of connected subcity places that we refer to as a natural city. This paper documents the rapid growth of natural cities...

We show that the creation of the first integrated pan-European transport network during Roman times influences economic integration over two millennia. Drawing on spatially highly disaggregated data on excavated Roman ceramics, we document that interregional trade was strongly influenced by...

We study the impact of international long-distance flights on the global spatial allocation of economic activity. To identify causal effects, we exploit variation due to regulatory and technological constraints which give rise to a discontinuity in connectedness between cities at a distance of...

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a multi-billion dollar infrastructure investment project, is heralded as a game changer for Pakistan's economy and for regional cooperation more generally. As a crucial part of the major development initiative led by China, known as ‘One Belt, One...

Congestion is a large problem in metropolitan areas. This paper provides a theoretical and empirical framework that can analyze whether congestion on commuting affects residential and workplace choice in metropolitan areas. First, we develop a quantitative urban model with congestion, to...

Zipf's law is one of the best-known empirical regularities of the city-size distribution. There is extensive research on the subject, where each city is treated symmetrically in terms of the cost of transactions with other cities. Recent developments in network theory facilitate the examination...

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...

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...