This study investigates determinants of golden locations in Chiang Mai city. It surveys 100 locations with 50 golden and 50 bad locations. It takes photographs of the locations and figures out the characteristics of them. It uses Binary Logit to classify between the golden and bad locations. The...

We study decentralized and optimal urbanization in a simple multi-sector model of a rural-urban economy focusing on productivity differences and internal trade frictions. We show that even in the absence of the typical externalities studied in the literature, such as agglomeration, congestion or...

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor in large cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not choose equal taxes...

We analyze the equilibrium and the optimal resource allocations in a monocentric city undermonopolistic competition. Unlike the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) case, wherethe equilibrium markups are independent of the city size, we present a variable elasticity ofsubstitution (VES)...

The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

Substantial attention has been given to the stylized fact that workforce education level tends to increase with city size. This paper demonstrates that the positive relation between city size and skill intensity is a spurious result due to the omission of housing cost, which increases with city...

It is obvious that holding city population constant, differences in cities across the world areenormous. Urban giants in poor countries are not large using measures such as land area,interior space or value of output. These differences are easily reconciled mathematically aspopulation is the...

We show that current measures of welfare changes which are all based on the compensated variation (CV) and the equivalent variation (EV) do not apply to an economy with cities. In addition, since these measures are utilized in a partial equilibrium analysis they capture only part of the effect...

We analyze the equilibrium and the optimal resource allocations in a monocentric city under monopolistic competition. Unlike the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) case, where the equilibrium markups are independent of city size, we present a variable elasticity of substitution (VES) case...

This paper develops a model for analysing problems related to centralisation and decentralisation. The model is of the new economic geography type, in which there are agglomeration gains in cities but not in rural areas. These gains are counteracted by residential preferences. We show that, even...