Following suggestions from theoretical and empirical literature on agglomeration and on social returns to education which emphasise the contribution of local knowledge spillovers to productivity and wage growth, this paper aims at uncovering the relationship between local human capital and...

This paper explores the concept of city ranking as a way to measure the dynamics and complexities of urban life. These rankings have various dimensions and uses. Both the context in which these rankings are done and their nature have changed considerably over time. These rankings face many...

This study examines how far and in what way 'Our cities are back', as claimed by England's Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. City...

With around 50% of the urban men between age 15 and 30 unemployed, Ethiopia has one of the highest unemployment rates worldwide. This paper describes the nature of unemployment among young men in urban Ethiopia. We analyse the determinants of incidence and duration and find that most variables...

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater frictions through congestion and other...

This paper explores the causes and consequences of regional taste differences. I introduce habit formation into a standard general equilibrium model. Household tastes evolve over time to favor foods consumed as a child. Thus, locally abundant foods are preferred in every region, as they were...

The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in the literature on poverty traps. We document...

We present theory and evidence highlighting the role of natural amenities in neighborhood dynamics, suburbanization, and variation across cities in the persistence of the spatial distribution of income. Our model generates three predictions that we confirm using a novel database of...

This paper investigates the impact of migration shocks on housing conditions and rental prices for the local population. The identification comes from the regional variation in the large influx of Syrian refugees to Jordan in the wake of the Syrian conflict which started in 2011. Combining...

The aim of this paper is to get new insight into the complex relationship between social inequalities and socioeconomic segregation by undertaking a comparative study North and South European cities. Our main finding shows that during the last global economic cycle from the 1980s through the...