research topics in economic geography

Top 50 Geography Research Topics [Revised]

Geography isn’t just about maps and memorizing capital cities; it’s a dynamic field that delves into everything from understanding our planet’s physical features to unraveling the complexities of human societies. In this blog, we’ll embark on a journey through fascinating geography research topics, ranging from climate change and urbanization to cultural dynamics and emerging trends. Whether you’re a curious student or simply someone intrigued by the world around you, join us as we explore the diverse realms of geography research.

What Are The Three Main Topics Of Geography?

Table of Contents

• Physical Geography
• Study of Earth’s physical features, processes, and phenomena.
• Example: Investigating the formation of mountains, erosion patterns in river systems, or the impact of climate change on ecosystems.
• Human Geography
• Examination of the interactions between human societies and their environments.
• Example: Analyzing urbanization trends, migration patterns, cultural landscapes, or economic activities within specific regions.
• Environmental Geography
• Focus on the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings, including the impact of human activities on the environment.
• Example: Researching pollution levels in urban areas, deforestation rates in tropical rainforests, or the conservation of endangered species and habitats.

50 Geography Research Topics: Category Wise

Physical geography research topics.

• Impact of climate change on polar ice caps.
• Patterns of desertification in arid regions.
• Formation and evolution of volcanic islands.
• Study of river meandering and channel migration.
• Factors influencing the distribution of biomes worldwide.

Human Geography Research Topics

• Urbanization dynamics in developing countries.
• Social and economic impacts of gentrification in urban neighborhoods.
• Migration patterns and trends in Europe.
• Cultural landscapes and identity politics in contested territories.
• Gender disparities in access to resources and opportunities in rural areas.

Environmental Geography Research Topics

• Analysis of air quality in megacities.
• Impacts of deforestation on local biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest.
• Water scarcity and management strategies in arid regions.
• Ecotourism and its role in sustainable development.
• Effects of marine pollution on coral reef ecosystems.

Geographical Techniques and Tools Research Topics

• Applications of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in disaster management.
• Remote sensing techniques for monitoring agricultural productivity.
• Cartographic visualization of population density and distribution.
• Spatial analysis of crime patterns in urban areas.
• Geographical modeling of disease spread and containment strategies.

Regional Geography Research Topics

• Socioeconomic disparities between urban and rural regions in India.
• Geopolitical tensions in the South China Sea.
• Cultural diversity and integration in multicultural cities like London or New York.
• Environmental challenges facing the African Sahel region.
• Regional impacts of globalization on indigenous communities in South America.

Cultural Geography Research Topics

• Influence of religion on cultural landscapes in the Middle East.
• Cultural diffusion and globalization in the digital age.
• Preservation of intangible cultural heritage in UNESCO World Heritage sites.
• Impact of colonialism on indigenous cultures in Australia.
• Gender roles and cultural practices in traditional societies.

Economic Geography Research Topics

• Spatial distribution of industries in emerging economies.
• Trade patterns and economic integration in the European Union.
• Impact of globalization on labor markets in Southeast Asia.
• Role of transportation infrastructure in regional economic development.
• Economic consequences of natural disasters on local communities.

Political Geography Research Topics

• Border disputes and territorial conflicts in the Middle East.
• Secessionist movements and autonomy struggles in Europe.
• Role of international organizations in conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
• Geopolitical implications of Arctic resource extraction.
• Influence of soft power and cultural diplomacy in international relations.

Social Geography Research Topics

• Spatial patterns of poverty and social exclusion in urban areas.
• Dynamics of neighborhood segregation and integration in diverse cities.
• Impact of social media on community engagement and activism.
• Gender-based violence and spatial justice in urban environments.
• Cultural dimensions of health disparities in rural communities.

Historical Geography Research Topics

• Legacy of colonialism in shaping urban landscapes in former colonies.
• Evolution of trade routes and their impact on cultural diffusion.
• Archaeological landscape studies of ancient civilizations.
• Historical geography of migration and diaspora communities.
• Environmental history of industrialization and its long-term impacts on ecosystems.

How To Write A Geography Research Paper?

Writing a geography research paper involves several key steps to ensure a well-structured, coherent, and informative document. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to write a geography research paper:

• Choose a Topic: Select a specific and focused research topic within the field of geography that interests you. Consider the scope of your paper, available resources, and the significance of the topic in the field.
• Conduct Research: Gather relevant sources of information such as scholarly articles, books, journals, government publications, and online databases. Use both primary and secondary sources to support your research and develop a comprehensive understanding of the topic.
• Develop a clear and short thesis statement that explains what your research paper is about. This statement should show the main idea or point you’re going to talk about in your paper.
• Organize your paper by making a plan or outline. Split it into different parts like the introduction, where you start talking about your topic and explain why it’s important. Then, include a literature review where you talk about what others have already studied about your topic. If you did any special methods in your research, talk about them in the methodology section. Then, show your findings or results, discuss them, and finally, conclude your paper. Make sure you outline all the important things you want to talk about in each section.
• Start your paper with an interesting introduction. Tell the reader some background information about your topic and why it’s important. Also, introduce your thesis statement here. Explain what you’ll be talking about in your research paper to help guide the reader through your paper.
• Conduct a Literature Review: Review existing literature and research related to your topic to contextualize your study and identify gaps or areas for further investigation. Summarize key findings, methodologies, and theories from previous studies to support your own research.
• Describe Your Methodology (If Applicable): If your research involves empirical data collection or analysis, describe the methodology and research design used in your study. Explain the research methods, data sources, sampling techniques, and analytical tools employed to gather and analyze data.
• Present Your Findings: Present the results of your research in a clear and systematic manner. Use tables, graphs, maps, and other visual aids to illustrate your findings and enhance comprehension. Provide descriptive and analytical interpretations of the data to support your arguments.
• Discuss Your Results: Analyze and interpret the significance of your research findings in relation to your thesis statement and research objectives. Discuss any patterns, trends, or relationships observed in the data and explore their implications for the broader field of geography.
• Draw Conclusions: Summarize the main findings of your research and reiterate the significance of your study. Discuss any limitations or constraints encountered during the research process and propose areas for future research or further investigation.
• Cite Your Sources: Ensure that you properly cite all sources of information used in your research paper according to the citation style specified by your instructor or academic institution. Use in-text citations and include a comprehensive bibliography or reference list at the end of your paper.
• Proofread and Revise: Review your research paper carefully for grammatical errors, typos, and inconsistencies. Revise and refine your writing to improve clarity, coherence, and overall quality. Consider seeking feedback from peers, mentors, or academic advisors to further enhance your paper.

Emerging Topics in Geography Research

As our world continues to evolve, new frontiers of geography research are constantly emerging. From the quest for sustainable development to the rise of smart cities and the challenges of climate resilience, researchers are grappling with complex issues that defy easy solutions.

One promising avenue of research is the integration of indigenous knowledge and perspectives into geographic studies. By recognizing the wisdom of traditional cultures and their deep connection to the land, researchers can develop more holistic approaches to environmental management and conservation.

In conclusion, geography research offers a rich tapestry of topics that span the natural and social sciences. Whether it’s unraveling the mysteries of climate change, exploring the dynamics of urbanization, or celebrating the diversity of cultural landscapes, there’s something for everyone in the world of geography research.

So, whether you’re a student embarking on geography research topics or simply a curious explorer seeking to understand the world around you, take heart in knowing that the adventure has only just begun. Happy exploring!

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Economic geography.

Research into regional and urban development, inequalities between places and the location of economic activity.

CEP research explains why some areas to do better than others unpicking the role that education, employment, infrastructure and institutions play in the growth of certain areas and what can be done to improve resilience to economic shocks. From 2008-2015, much of this work was done in collaboration with the Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC)

Since 2015, the work of SERC has been included within the CEP's Urban programme. Ongoing research includes analyses of what triggers urban decline and how globalisation can amplify the differences between areas within countries.

Key Publications

Search Economic geography Publications

Featured work, why do some regions fail to recover from economic shocks.

Anthony Venables presents research examining regional disparities in the UK, from the 1970s to today. Recorded at CEPR's June Paris Symposium.

Slavery and Britain's industrial revolution

Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth explore the impact of wealth derived from slavery on the geography of economic development in Britain and the country's industrial revolution.

A tale of two cities (part 2)

The productivity of our largest cities lags the UK average, bucking the global trend for bigger urban areas to be more productive. This report on Greater Manchester, and a twin paper on the Birmingham urban area, provides grounded answers to the difficult question of what would it actually take to achieve a higher-productivity future for these two cities.

Economic geography Publications

Journal article, journal of urban economics: forthcoming, the spatial impacts of a massive rail disinvestment program: the beeching axe.

This paper investigates the reversibility of the effects of transport infrastructure investments, based on a programme that removed much of the rail network in Britain during the mid-20th century. We find that a 10% loss... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Stephan Heblich and Edward W. Pinchbeck

17 August 2024

Keywords: rail ; infrastructure ; beeching cuts

Cities and the sea level

Construction on low elevation coastal zones is risky for both residents and taxpayers who bail them out. To investigate this construction, we analyze spatially disaggregated data covering the entire US Atlantic and Gulf ... Read more...

Yatang Lin, Thomas K.J. McDermott and Guy Michaels

1 August 2024

Keywords: cities ; climate change ; sea level rise

CEP discussion paper

Identifying agglomeration shadows: long-run evidence from ancient ports.

We examine "agglomeration shadows" that emerge around large cities, which discourage some economic activities in nearby areas. Identifying agglomeration shadows is complicated, however, by endogenous city formation and "... Read more...

Richard Hornbeck, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

26 June 2024

Keywords: agglomeration shadow ; urban hierarchy ; new economic geography

CEP election analysis

Spatial disparities in productivity and income.

This briefing looks at the causes and consequences of UK spatial disparities and what, if anything, policy can do to address them.... Read more...

Will Brett-Harding and Henry G. Overman

20 June 2024

Keywords: election 2024 ; economic geography ; productivity ; uk economy ; election2024

CentrePiece article

The economic costs of the failing planning system.

Paul Cheshire began to investigate the economic effects of the UK’s planning system 40 years ago. Here he draws on a recent public lecture – and panel discussion with Stephen Aldridge, Kate Barker and Simon Wolfson – to ... Read more...

Paul Cheshire

Keywords: uk economy ; housing ; planning ; economic geography

Putting quantitative models to the test: An application to Trump's trade war

The primary motivation behind quantitative modeling in international trade and many other fields is to shed light on the economic consequences of policy changes. To help assess and potentially strengthen the credibility ... Read more...

Rodrigo Adao, Arnaud Costinot and Dave Donaldson

7 June 2024

Keywords: international trade ; urban economics ; testing economic models

Centre for Cities (podcast):

City talks: sharing the benefits of a high-tech economy (podcast).

Centre for Cities chief executive Andrew Carter is joined by Professor Neil Lee, professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics and author of Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; technological change ; podcast

Cool cities: The value of urban trees

Cities are warming faster than their rural surroundings. But the ecosystem support provided by urban forestry is often omitted from climate policies due to the difficulty in assigning to it a credible monetary sum. Lu Ha... Read more...

Lu Han, Stephan Heblich, Christopher Timmins and Yanos Zylberberg

25 April 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; green growth ; climate ; trees

External publication

Labour economics: thinking through labour's economic agenda.

With the Labour Party having vowed to achieve the fastest growth in the G7, the Social Market Foundation has brought together leading economic experts to provide independent analysis of the party's proposed approach - an... Read more...

Timothy Besley, Aveek Bhattacharya, Jagjit Chadha, Paul Cheshire, Neil Lee, Alan Manning, Andrew McNeil, Margarida Bandeira Morais, Henry G. Overman, David Soskice, Anna Valero, Giles Wilkes and Alison Wolf

22 April 2024

Keywords: uk economy ; politics ; labour ; ; economic geography ; green growth ; housing ; ; productivity ; wages ; employment ; schools ; industrial strategy

What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth:

Do plural ownership policies matter for local economies.

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino outlines how a new evidence briefing published by the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth provides guidance for local policymakers on how to think through some of the local economic impacts ... Read more...

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino

16 April 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; evidence ;

LSE EUROPP:

What explains the gender ideology gap.

Felipe Carozzi and Andres Gago present evidence from Spain that can provide a partial explanation for a growing ideological gap between young men and women across the world.... Read more...

Felipe Carozzi and Andres Gago

11 April 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; gender gap ;

New opportunities in transport investment for growth?

In February, the government announced the new Local Transport Fund, a package of £4.7bn of spending. Places will be able to spend funds on a range of transport investments, with the aim of improving connectivity within a... Read more...

Will Brett-Harding

28 March 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; transport ; funding ; uk economy

Journal of Regional Science:

Within-city roads and urban growth.

In this paper we study the role of within-city roads layout in fostering city growth. Within-city roads networks have not been studied extensively in economics although they are essential to facilitate human interactions... Read more...

Paul Brandily and Ferdinand Rauch

20 March 2024

Keywords: road layout ; sub&#8208 ; saharan africa ; urban planning ; urbanisation

Regional Studies:

Global production networks meets evolutionary economic geography.

Two of the canonical approaches in regional studies are global production networks (GPNs) and evolutionary economic geography (EEG). Recent geopolitical and economic events have shown the importance of both theories in e... Read more...

8 March 2024

Keywords: global production networks ; global value chains ; relatedness ; evolutionary economic geography ; complexity

LSE Public Policy Review:

Spatial labour market inequality and social protection in the uk.

Spatial inequality in economic outcomes is increasingly seen as a problem for national economies. This paper considers spatial inequality in the UK labour market, its causes, and potential policy solutions. Relative to o... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham and Neil Lee

1 March 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; europe ; uk economy ; wages

Making sense of services

Will Brett-Harding outlines a two-step approach for thinking about what high growth potential services look like at the local level.... Read more...

27 February 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; local economic growth ; services

How where you live affects your pay

Tackling inequality between regions within a country has become a political priority across much of the advanced world. Luis Bauluz, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Filip... Read more...

Luis Bauluz, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Filip Novokmet and Moritz Schularick

20 February 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; wages ; equality

Ending stagnation

What can be done to address Britain’s relative economic decline over the past decade and a half? The final report of the Economy 2030 Inquiry presents an ambitious strategy for reversing decades of under-investment, by t... Read more...

Keywords: uk economy ; wages ; green growth ; brexit ; social mobility ; employment ; economic geography ; productivity

LSE British Politics and Policy:

Global britain has failed - what next.

The vision of post-Brexit Britain was one of international trade deals that would propel the country into a new era of prosperity. That vision of "Global Britain" is now dead. Thomas Sampson argues that the only viable a... Read more...

Thomas Sampson

16 February 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; globalisation ; uk economy ; brexit ; eu

CEP Insights

Insights: condensed.

The Insights series is an introduction to the work of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). Each Insight highlights the contribution of CEP researchers to both academic understanding and policymaking in one area of ... Read more...

6 February 2024

Keywords: brexit ; trade ; education ; immigration ; cities ; regional inequality ; spatial disparities ; economic geography ; gender ; labour markets ; wages ; income ; green growth ; growth ; productivity ; wellbeing ; employment ; crime ; social mobility

Trade liberalisation can weaken unions and reduce votes for the left

Intuitively, trade liberalisation should increase the appeal of left-wing parties that offer to protect workers with protectionist policies. Pedro Ogeda, Emanuel Ornelas and Rodrigo Soares use evidence from Brazil to sho... Read more...

Pedro Molina Ogeda, Emanuel Ornelas and Rodrigo R. Soares

4 February 2024

Keywords: globalisation ; economic geography ; politics ; trade

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local retail prices, product variety, and neighborhood change.

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba... Read more...

Fernando Borraz, Felipe Carozzi, Nicolás González-Pampillón and Leandro Zipitria

1 February 2024

Keywords: retail and wholesale trade ; e-commerce ; economic development: urban ; rural ; regional ; and transportation analysis ; housing ; infrastructure ; urban ; rural ; regional ; real estate ; and transportation economics: other demand ; urban ; rural ; regional ; real estate ; and transportation economics: regional migration ; regional labor markets ; population ; neighborhood characteristics ; housing supply and markets ; production analysis and firm location: government policy ;

Neoclassical growth in an interdependent world

The neoclassical growth model remains a crucial reference point for economists thinking about cross-country income dynamics, but it imposes strong assumptions about goods and capital markets. Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu, ... Read more...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu, Stephen J. Redding and Motohiro Yogo

31 January 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; neoclassical growth ; growth

The state of the UK economy 2024

The state of the UK economy is always an important matter, but it is all the more so in what looks likely to be an election year. This UK in a Changing Europe report takes stock of the UK economy in order to assess how i... Read more...

Arun Advani, David Bailey, Ben Brindle, Simon Burgess, Patrick Dunleavy, Sarah Hall, Stephen Hansaker, Christian A. L. Hilber, Donald Houston, Ethan Ilzetzki, Sandra McNally, Henry G. Overman, Jonathan Portes, Huw Roberts, Thomas Sampson, Andy Summers, Madeleine Sumption, Phil Tomlinson, Tony Wilson and Ben Zaranko

Keywords: brexit ; economic geography ; employment ; green growth ; immigration ; productivity ; schools ; wages ; uk economy ; technological change ; macroeconomics ; inequality ; public services ; tax policy ; trade ; industrial policy

The experience of war shapes communities and future wars

Countries currently involved in active warfare - Ukraine, Russia, and Israel most prominently - have launched intense mobilisation campaigns to expand their armies. This column examines what compels ordinary men and wome... Read more...

Felipe Carozzi, Edward W. Pinchbeck and Luca Repetto

20 January 2024

Keywords: war ; history ; uk economy ; economic geography

LSE Impact:

Dashboards have the power to make complex research accessible to the public and policymakers.

While researchers often point to the relevance of their research, economic models and econometric methods are typically inaccessible to a wider audience. Gabriel Ahlfeldt explains how interactive dashboards represent a u... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt

3 January 2024

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; housing ; property ; index ; price ; real estate

Urban Studies:

Unbundling tenure security and demand for property rights: evidence from urban tanzania.

Rapid urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa occurs with little land registration, and government-led regularisation schemes often find limited uptake of title deeds by residents. In theory, there could be private and public... Read more...

Martina Manara and Tanner Regan

1 January 2024

Keywords: development ; informality ; property rights reform ; tenure security ; urban africa

Journal of Environmental Psychology: Forthcoming

Working memory and fluid intelligence are differentially related to categories of urban fabric in older adults: results from the berlin aging study.

Urbanization is Globally increasing at a rapid rate but its consequences for mental health, including cognitive functioning, are not well understood. In particular, little is known about the effects of different morpholo... Read more...

Sandra Duzel, Peter Eibich, Jurgen Gallinat, Jan Goebel, Christian Krekel, Simone Kuhn, Ulman Lindenberger, Anna Mascherek and Gert G. Wagner

31 December 2023

Keywords: urban fabric ; levels of urbanicity ; cognition ; berlin aging study ii ; georeferencing data

Urban-biased structural change

Economic activity in high-income countries has shifted towards services and away from manufacturing. But research remains scant on the patterns of structural change within countries across urban and rural areas. Using mi... Read more...

Natalie Chen, Dennis Novy, Carlo Perroni and Horng Chern Wong

24 December 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; structural change ; urban

Corporate landlords are eroding the American dream of homeownership, especially in black neighborhoods

There has been a growing trend for institutional investors to purchase single-family homes and convert them to permanent rental properties. At the same time, homeownership rates for black households have declined on par ... Read more...

Stephen B. Billings and Adam Soliman

18 December 2023

Keywords: housing ; us ; race ; economic geography

Fair employment policies: thinking through local impacts

Will Brett-Harding explains why we should assess the local economic impacts of fair employment policies and why it is important to think carefully about the economic logic and the evidence before pursuing them as a polic... Read more...

11 December 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; fair employment ; local economic growth

The UK has great strengths, but is a decade and a half into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was straining the living standards of low- and middle-income Britain well befor... Read more...

4 December 2023

Keywords: economy2030 ; brexit ; economic geography ; employment ; green growth ; productivity ; social mobility ; technological change ; uk economy ; wages

Using firm-level data from France, we document that the shift of economic activity from manufacturing to services over the last few decades has been urban-biased: structural change has been more pronounced in areas with ... Read more...

28 November 2023

Keywords: agglomeration ; cities ; firm sorting ; manufacturing ; productivity ; services ; trade costs

Project Syndicate:

What to do about ukraine's brain drain.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 fuelled migration on a scale unseen since World War II, leaving 15 per cent of the population residing outside the country to this day. When Ukraine eventually gets the chanc... Read more...

Giacomo Anastasia and Tito Boeri

22 November 2023

Keywords: ukraine ; russia ; war ; ; employment ; ; immigration ; human capital ; economic geography

Planning may be a political hot potato but radical reform cannot wait

Planning - largely because of the cruel growth in the unaffordability of housing - has risen up the political agenda. Reforms are urgently needed to allow more homes to be built, but change is notoriously difficult. Ahea... Read more...

15 November 2023

Keywords: uk economy ; housing ; economic geography

The skyscraper revolution: Global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17,... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Remi Jedwab

14 November 2023

Keywords: urban density ; international buildings heights ; skyscrapers ; tall buildings ; sustainable urbanization ; city growth ; commercial real estate ; housing supply ; urban sprawl ; land savings ; housing affordability ; geographical constraints ; environment

Interview with Neil Lee - "If we want to have innovative cities, they have to deliver for everyone"

In an interview with LSE Cities, Neil Lee discusses what's driving anti-metropolitan politics in Europe and how a more inclusive innovation economy could help address it.... Read more...

3 November 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; globalisation ; europe ; wellbeing ; politics

Blog series: Understanding core economic concepts in economic growth

This blog series, aimed primarily at those working in local and central government, provides deep-dives into various components of economic growth, and some key concepts that affect the impact of economic growth policies... Read more...

Henry G. Overman

2 November 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; local economic growth

To what extent did the wealth derived from slavery contribute to Europe's economic growth? Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth find that slaveholding areas of Britain were less agricultural, closer to ... Read more...

Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth

26 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; history ;

LSE Business Review:

Britain can promote private investment and economic growth. here's how.

The UK investment ecosystem needs rewiring across the board to increase firms' desire to invest in productive and sustainable assets, and to enhance their ability to do so. Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, ... Read more...

Paul Brandily, Mimosa Distefano, Krishan Shah, Gregory Thwaites and Anna Valero

24 October 2023

Keywords: economy2030 ; employment ; green growth ; productivity ; uk economy ; planning ; pensions ; labour markets ; infrastructure

Understanding capitalisation

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discusses key concepts to consider when thinking about capitalisation for local economic growth policies.... Read more...

23 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; capitalisation

CEP Insights: Places and...

CEP research on cities and regions examines the drivers of spatial disparities - what leads certain parts of the country to be richer and others poorer? It explores the impact on economic development and policies that ma... Read more...

20 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; productivity ; skills ; globalisation

Understanding tradable and non-tradable sectors

Helene Donnat discusses what to consider when thinking about tradable and non-tradables in policymaking.... Read more...

Helene Donnat

19 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; tradables

Understanding crowding out, displacement, and leakage

Will Brett-Harding discusses what to consider regarding crowding out, displacement and leakage, when thinking about local economic growth policies.... Read more...

10 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; displacement ; leakage ; crowding out

New evidence on spatial wage inequality across North America and Western Europe

Spatial inequality has become a key policy concern across much of the advanced world, prompting a spate of government action on the issue in recent years. This column presents evidence showing that, contrary to the popul... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; spatial inequality ; income

Industrial policy and the great divergence

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different poli... Read more...

Reka Juhasz and Claudia Steinwender

6 October 2023

Keywords: industrial policy ; first wave of globalization ; industrialization ; infant industry protection ; technology policy ; transport infrastructure ; telegraph ; 19th century ; industrial strategy

Understanding additionality and deadweight

Will Brett-Harding discusses additionality and deadweight, the twin concepts which are essential to assessing policy effectiveness.... Read more...

3 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy

Time for a strategy to boost productivity in Manchester and beyond

The UK has a significant productivity problem and the poor performance of the nation's largest cities outside the capital contribute to this problem. Expert economists set out what change would be needed to set Greater M... Read more...

Paul Brandily, Mike Brewer, Nye Cominetti, Matt Coombes, Adam Corlett, Lindsay Judge, Felicia Odamtten, Henry G. Overman, Cara Pacitti, Gui Rodrigues, Krishan Shah, Paul Swinney and Lalitha Try

2 October 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; manchester ; greater manchester ; uk economy

Economics Observatory:

How can uk policy-makers make homes more affordable.

Housing in the UK has become seriously unaffordable; the problem is likely to get worse and younger people are being hit the hardest. Reforms that could be effective in solving the crisis are considered politically infea... Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber

Keywords: economic geography ; housing ; uk economy

Understanding multipliers

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discusses why we need to consider multipliers when thinking about local economic growth policies.... Read more...

26 September 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; multipliers

What can house prices tell us about the environmental costs of overhead power lines?

The transition to green energy requires many new electrical power lines to be constructed. In the UK, this construction is a contentious planning and political issue. Steve Gibbons and Cheng Keat Tang show the local cost... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Cheng Keat Tang

25 September 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; green growth

Understanding efficiency and equity

Henry Overman explains why we need to consider efficiency and equity when thinking about local economic growth policies.... Read more...

20 September 2023

Keywords: uk economy ; economic geography

Few would disagree that the UK has a significant productivity problem, or fail to recognise that the poor performance of the nation's largest cities outside the capital contribute to that situation. As the Economy 2030 I... Read more...

19 September 2023

Keywords: uk economy ; economy2030 ; economic geography ; productivity

A tale of two cities (part 1)

After the success of the Commonwealth Games in 2022, Birmingham is now in the news for the wrong reasons. Financial difficulties facing the City Council culminated in a formal declaration on 5 September 2023 that Britain... Read more...

14 September 2023

Keywords: economy2030 ; economic geography ; productivity ; growth

Understanding agglomeration

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino explains why considering agglomeration is important for local economic growth policies and what to consider when thinking about agglomeration.... Read more...

Brazil's comparative advantage in soybean production triggered deforestation

Tropical ecosystems house an immense biomass, which makes it imperative to understand how they are affected by technology and trade. Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa examine the Brazilian rainforest's... Read more...

Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa

12 September 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; globalisation ; climate ; trade ; environment ; green growth

Public sector relocation: how to think about local impacts

Will Brett-Harding investigates the effects of public sector relocation on local areas that are destinations for the relocated or new public sector activity.... Read more...

11 September 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; public sector ; uk economy

A true housing crisis needs more than post-truth politicians

The UK's housing crisis is particularly acute by international standards. Instead of identifying real solutions, argues Paul Cheshire, policy-makers have offered only rhetorical devices, ineffective local mechanisms, and... Read more...

5 September 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; housing

in Policy Landscape 2023

What are the public policy challenges confronting the UK? What plans do the parties have for addressing them? To what extent are these plans fit for purpose? As Parliament returns from its summer recess, Full Fact and U... Read more...

Keywords: uk economy ; economic geography ; housing

Africa at LSE:

Public disclosure policies don't improve tax collection in uganda.

Public disclosure policies are designed to raise tax compliance where alternative enforcement capacity is limited. But they can also have negative consequences by showcasing the true extent of tax compliance, write Priya... Read more...

Priya Manwaring and Tanner Regan

29 August 2023

Keywords: africa ; tax ; government ; policy ; economic geography

Understanding supply and demand

Helene Donnat explains what supply and demand is and why policymakers need to consider it to design effective policies.... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; supply and demand

What are spatial disparities?

Henry Overman explains what spatial disparities are, why we need to consider them when thinking about local economic growth policies and whether we should try to reduce them.... Read more...

22 August 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; spatial disparities ; local economic growth ; inequality

How the scars of past wars continue to shape UK society

Edward Pinchbeck, Felipe Carozzi and Luca Repetto discuss new research exploring how memory of losses from war affects communities and shapes social values. Their findings suggest the impact can reverberate through gener... Read more...

7 August 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; war ; community

Knowledge spillovers from clean innovation. A tradeoff between growth and climate?

Innovation policy faces a tradeoff between growth and climate objectives when the knowledge spillover externality from clean innovation is low compared to other sectors. To make such a comparison, we use patent data to e... Read more...

Ralf Martin and Dennis Verhoeven

12 July 2023

Keywords: innovation ; knowledge spillovers ; clean technology ; innovation policy ; green transition ; net-zero ; patent data ; economic geography ; green growth ; productivity ; technological change ; industrial strategy

CEP occasional paper

The linear algebra of economic geography models.

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elastici... Read more...

Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

11 July 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; trade ; migration

Rebuilding cities in Ukraine

Presuming that Ukraine successfully reclaims most or all of its lost territories from Russian occupation, there will be a political drive to bring refugees back to their hometowns and to rebuild destroyed cities. This co... Read more...

Richard K. Green, J. Vernon Henderson, Matthew E. Kahn, Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy and Andrii Parkhomenko

8 July 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; ukraine ; russia ; ; immigration

Public spaces: key points to keep in mind

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discusses the local economic benefits and costs of possible schemes regarding the public realm and green spaces.... Read more...

4 July 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; local economy ; public spaces

The supply chain for electric car batteries is changing the world's geopolitics

The rising demand for electric vehicles is changing the geopolitical landscape, as the world pivots away from fossil fuels towards the materials critical to the EV supply chain. As manufacturers and countries race to sec... Read more...

Robert J.R. Elliott, Gavin Harper, Benjamin Jones and Viet Nguyen-Tien

27 June 2023

Keywords: productivity ; technological change ; green growth ; economic geography

Thinking through social infrastructure wider outcomes

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discusses the indirect effects of social infrastructure on communities, as part of the What works Centre for Local Economic Growth's 'thinking through series' which focuses on how local policymakers... Read more...

22 June 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; social infrastructure ; levelling up

Centre for Cities City Talks:

City talks: what are the signs that the uk is levelling up (podcast).

Henry Overman speaks to Chief Executive Andrew Carter about how to measure the scale of the underperformance of cities in the UK and search for evidence that could point us towards the right solutions, in this podcast ep... Read more...

Andrew Carter and Henry G. Overman

Keywords: economic geography ; spatial disparities ; podcast

Seizing sustainable growth opportunities from tidal stream energy in the UK

This is the decade for managing the immense risks of climate change, and delivery on net zero. That means rapidly increasing the share of renewable sources in our energy mix alongside a step-change in energy and resource... Read more...

Pia Andres, Ralf Martin, Esin Serin, Arjun Shah and Anna Valero

Keywords: green growth ; growth ; policy ; net zero ; technological change ; employment ; economic geography ; uk economy ; industrial strategy

To what extent did the wealth derived from slavery contribute to Europe’s economic growth? Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Hans-Joachim Voth find that slaveholding areas of Britain were less agricultural, closer to ... Read more...

20 June 2023

Keywords: uk economy ; technological change ; economic geography

Stepping up evaluation of active travel

Will Brett Harding discusses increasing active travel and what this means for locally delivered projects, and more generally about plans for determining the benefits of active travel investments.... Read more...

15 June 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; active travel ; local economy

How can we make homes more affordable?

Housing has become unaffordable, the problem is likely to get worse, and the young are hit the hardest. Christian Hilber argues that we face a conundrum: reforms that would be effective are considered politically infeasi... Read more...

24 May 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; housing

Why the government's levelling-up plans need a reality check

The government has made tackling the UK's persistent spatial inequalities one of its top priorities. Yet progress has been slow or absent, because of insufficient investment, an underestimation of the scale of the challe... Read more...

23 May 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; levelling up

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The local labor market effects of modern manufacturing capital: evidence from france.

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation te... Read more...

Philippe Aghion, Celine Antonin, Simon Bunel and Xavier Jaravel

Keywords: firm behavior: empirical analysis ; capital budgeting ; fixed investment and inventory studies ; capacity ; financing policy ; financial risk and risk management ; capital and ownership structure ; value of firms ; goodwill ; labor demand ; industry studies: manufacturing: general ; personnel economics: firm employment decisions ; promotions ; urban ; rural ; regional ; real estate ; and transportation economics: regional migration ; regional labor markets ; population ; neighborhood characteristics

The What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth: some lessons from the first ten years

In the what works centres: lessons and insights from an evidence movement.

What can policy do to increase local economic growth? This is a question that has challenged decision makers and academics for decades. It's also a fundamental question today, when the UK government has made economic gro... Read more...

Danielle Mason, Max Nathan and Henry G. Overman

28 April 2023

Keywords: uk economy ; economic geography ; growth ; policy ; urban

All aboard: The effects of port development

There are large potential gains to improving ports, but space constraints and other costs affect who benefits from port infrastructure, say Cesar Ducruet, Reka Juhasz, David Krisztian Nagy and Claudia Steinwender.... Read more...

César Ducruet, Reka Juhasz, Dávid Krisztián Nagy and Claudia Steinwender

25 April 2023

Keywords: trade ; globalisation ; ports ; infrastructure

What does the evidence say on place-based intervention for net zero?

Will Brett-Harding discusses the existing evidence on place-based intervention for net zero, in light of the global climate crisis and the magnitude of the damage that will, or already has, come with it.... Read more...

21 April 2023

What is levelling up? (video)

Neil Lee explains what levelling up is and how investing in more cities outside of London can help close the socio-economic gap between different areas in the UK.... Read more...

18 April 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; levelling up ; video ; uk economy

How can we make homes more affordable? (Podcast)

In this LSE IQ episode on how we can make homes more affordable, Christian Hilber shares the reasons behind the UK's current housing affordability crisis, explaining the obstacles to building more houses as a way of over... Read more...

4 April 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; housing ; housing crisis ; podcast

Community Wealth Building for local growth and wider outcomes

Community Wealth Building (CWB) is an approach to local economic development which focuses on retaining public spending and economic activity in a local area. Will Brett-Harding discusses evidence on local economic impac... Read more...

3 April 2023

Keywords: economic geography

Thinking through public spaces wider outcomes

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino assesses the local economic impacts of public spaces, exploring the benefits the evidence points towards, and asks what we need to do going forward.... Read more...

28 March 2023

Econometrica:

Dynamic spatial general equilibrium.

We incorporate forward-looking capital accumulation into a dynamic discrete choice model of migration. We characterize the steady-state equilibrium; generalize existing dynamic exact-hat algebra techniques to incorporate... Read more...

17 March 2023

Keywords: spatial dynamics ; economic geography ; trade ; migration ;

Investment Zones and Innovation

In the Spring 2023 budget, the chancellor announced a newly revamped Investment Zones (IZs) programme as part of the UK's push for growth. This is a significantly scaled back version of the programme outlined by the prev... Read more...

Introducing our new logic model guide and checklist

Anamaria Tibocha-Nino outlines what makes a good logic model for a policy, programme or project, used to underpin funding bids and to develop successful local programmes.... Read more...

8 March 2023

Wider outcomes from public procurement

Will Brett-Harding and Anamaria Tibocha-Nino discuss the effects of local public procurement and whether it can deliver additional social, environmental, or economic benefits on top of core goods or services being bought... Read more...

Will Brett-Harding and Anamaria Tibocha-Nino

6 March 2023

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Quantitative urban models: from theory to data.

Economic activity is highly unevenly distributed within cities, as reflected in the concentration of economic functions in specific locations, such as finance in the Square Mile in London. The extent to which this concen... Read more...

Stephen J. Redding

1 March 2023

Keywords: quantitative ; urban ; trade

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management : Forthcoming

Dirty density: air quality and the density of american cities.

We study the effect of urban density on the exposure of city dwellers to air pollution using data from the United States urban system. Exploiting geological features to instrument for density, we find an economically and... Read more...

Felipe Carozzi and Sefi Roth

Keywords: air pollution ; cities ; density ; health

Regional Studies: Forthcoming

Inclusive innovation in cities: from buzzword to policy.

'Inclusive innovation' has become an increasingly important subnational policy agenda. This paper reviews this agenda, critiques its current usage and presents a new framework for how the concept can be applied by city g... Read more...

24 February 2023

Keywords: inclusive growth ; inclusive innovation ; innovation ; urban policy

Commute and thrive

The advent of commuting in 1930s London opened up opportunities to working-class people. Andrew Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth show how public transport boosts the labour market.... Read more...

Andrew Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth

21 February 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; technological change ; labour market ; uk economy ; wages ; social mobility

Does active travel have local economic benefits?

Active travel involves making journeys by physically active means such as walking and cycling. While the link to emissions is obvious, we know less about the local economic impacts. Anamaria Tibocha-Nino and Will Brett-H... Read more...

15 February 2023

Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution

To what extent the wealth derived from slavery contributed to Europe's economic growth has been a hotly debated question for more than two centuries. Most economists studying the question have looked at national aggregat... Read more...

11 February 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; growth ; industrial revolution

Innovation and accelerators

In the new year speech, the Prime Minister argued "the most powerful plan for sustainable growth is to position the UK to fully benefit from the incredible scientific and technological change the world is seeing". New me... Read more...

8 February 2023

VoxEU Talk:

Slavery and the industrial revolution (podcast).

Did slaveholding accelerate the industrial revolution in Britain? This controversial theory was first argued by Eric Williams almost 80 years ago but has lacked strong supporting evidence - until now. Stephan Heblich and... Read more...

Stephan Heblich and Hans-Joachim Voth

3 February 2023

Keywords: economic geography ; race ; slavery ; industrial revolution ; podcast

Progressive cities: urban-rural polarisation of social values and economic development around the world

In contrast to the conservative values of rural populations, cities are often seen as bulwarks of more tolerant, liberal and progressive values. This urban-rural divide in values has become one of the major fault lines i... Read more...

Neil Lee, Davide Luca, Jonas Stein and Javier Terrero-Davila

2 February 2023

Keywords: cities ; economic development ; modernisation ; progressive values ; urban-rural polarisation

Level best? The levelling up agenda and UK regional inequality

'Levelling up' - a policy agenda focused on reducing regional inequalities - has become the new mantra in British politics. This paper critiques the policy programme from its emergence in 2019 to the publication of the 2... Read more...

Mark Fransham, Max Herbertson, Neil Lee, Margarida Bandeira Morais and Mihaela Pop

30 January 2023

Keywords: cities ; funding ; inequality ; levelling up ; policy ; regions

The economics of cities: from theory to data

25 January 2023

Keywords: cities ; commuting ; transportation ; urban economics

FRBSF Economic Letter:

Supply chain disruptions, trade costs, and labor markets.

Global supply chain disruptions due to the Covid-19 pandemic have increased the costs of trade between countries. Given the interconnectedness of the US economy with the rest of the world, higher trade costs can have imp... Read more...

Andres Rodriguez-Clare, Mauricio Ulate and Jose P Vasquez

19 January 2023

Keywords: covid-19 ; economic geography ; trade ; global supply chains

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science : Forthcoming

Modeling clusters from the ground up: a web data approach.

This paper proposes a new methodological framework to identify economic clusters over space and time. We employ a unique open source dataset of geolocated and archived business webpages and interrogate them using Natural... Read more...

Max Nathan, Christoph Stich and Emmanouil Tranos

1 January 2023

Keywords: clusters ; business ; cities ; technology industry ; machine learning ;

Vox Ukraine:

"what about the economy": vernon henderson on the challenges of ukraine's recovery (podcast).

Yulia Mincheva, the Analytics Society at VoxUkraine, and J. Vernon Henderson discuss how to rebuild destroyed cities and create conditions for their repopulation in this podcast, "What about the economy?"... Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson and Julia Mincheva

20 December 2022

Keywords: ukraine ; economic geography ; globalisation ; podcast

Investments Zones can drive innovation if we learn from past mistakes

A key part of the previous government's plan for growth and currently being reformulated, Investment Zones have for decades been a policy aimed at delivering regional economic development, or levelling-up. Drawing on evi... Read more...

Max Herbertson and Neil Lee

13 December 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; productivity ; innovation ;

The geography of structural transformation: effects on inequality and mobility

The interplay between structural transformation in the aggregate and local economies is key to understanding spatial inequality and worker mobility. This paper develops a dynamic overlapping generations model of economic... Read more...

Kohei Takeda

12 December 2022

Keywords: structural transformation ; upward mobility ; labour mobility ; economic geography

Accelerating urban economic growth in Ukraine

In rebuilding ukraine: principles and policies.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of what Ukraine should become after the war and what tools policymakers can use to fulfill these goals. The leitmotif of this book is clear: reconstruction is not about rebuildin... Read more...

7 December 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; globalisation ; ukraine ; russia

Housing policy and affordable housing

In oxford research encyclopedia of economics and finance.

Lack of affordable housing is a growing and often primary policy concern in cities throughout the world. The main underlying cause for the "affordability crisis," which has been mounting for decades, is a combination of ... Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schöni

22 November 2022

Keywords: housing policy ; housing ; affordability ; affordable housing ; supply constraints ; land use controls ; housing subsidies ; public housing ; social housing ; rent control ; urban

Stagnation nation

Even before the cost of living crisis, a toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was threatening UK living standards, particularly for families on low and middle incomes. The Economy 2030 Inquiry is examinin... Read more...

20 October 2022

Keywords: economy2030 ; brexit ; covid-19 ; economic geography ; employment ; green growth ; productivity ; social mobility ; uk economy ; wages ; technological change ; inequality ; net zero ;

Policies for affordable housing: options and obstacles

The crisis of housing affordability has been mounting for decades, driven by growing demand for properties in desirable areas where supply is limited. Numerous policies have been enacted across countries, but many are in... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; housing ; policy ; affordable housing ; supply constraints ; land use controls ; housing subsidies ; public housing ; social housing ; rent control ; inequality

Working from home around the world

The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a surge in working from home. This big shift has endured and is likely to continue, even after the pandemic. This column reports that employees value the option to work from home 2-3 days ... Read more...

Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls and Pablo Zarate

8 October 2022

Keywords: productivity ; economic geography ; employment

CEPR & VideoVox Economics:

Why do some regions fail to recover from economic shocks (video).

Recorded at CEPR's June Paris Symposium, Tony Venables presents his research on those regional disparities in the UK which originated in the 1970s through negative trade and technology shocks and whose long run consequen... Read more...

Anthony J. Venables

5 October 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; employment ; technological change ; wages

The Conversation:

Research into 1930s commuting in london shows how public transport boosts the labour market.

An argument to justify public transport closures has often been lack of profitability for the service provider. However, Andrew J. Seltzer and Jonathan Wadsworth find that such discussions often miss much of the full val... Read more...

27 September 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; employment ; uk economy

The G7 plan for a price cap on Russian oil: Views of leading economists

To limit the funding of Russia's continued aggravation towards Ukraine and its subsequent impact on soaring energy prices, the G7 countries plan to impose a price cap on purchases of Russian oil and related products. Man... Read more...

Romesh Vaitilingam

Keywords: economic geography ; price caps ; ukraine ; russia

Investment zones and the problem of displacement

In September 2022, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng set out plans for 'Investment Zones' as the part of the government's renewed focus on growth. A crucial question around area based initiatives is the extent to which growth in... Read more...

26 September 2022

Responsible sourcing? Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

The authors investigate whether responsible sourcing policies implemented by multinational enterprises for their suppliers have impacts on the ground and, if they do, what these mean for firms and workers in the host cou... Read more...

Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Benjamin Faber, Cecile Gaubert, Isabela Manelici and Jose P Vasquez

23 September 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; global value chains ; wellbeing

The Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy:

Trade policy, regional disparities, and inclusive growth.

Places matter to people. For many people, the place where they grow up will become the place where they live and work. Many countries experience regional disparities in economic performance that are profound and persiste... Read more...

2 September 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; levelling up ; uk economy ; trade

Lessons from a robust evaluation of the UK's Eat Out to Help Out scheme

Eat Out to Help Out had a limited effect on footfall and recruitment. Supporting businesses in any context (Covid-19, energy crisis, etc.) needs consideration of effective mechanisms for encouraging programme take-up and... Read more...

Gonzalo Nunez-Chaim

Keywords: economic geography ; covid-19 ; uk economy ; eat out to help out

Applied Energy:

Optimising the geospatial configuration of a future lithium-ion battery recycling industry in the transition to electric vehicles and a circular economy.

Rapid electrification of the transport system will generate substantial volumes of Lithium-ion-battery (LiB) waste as batteries reach their end-of-life. Much attention focuses on the recycling processes, neglecting a bro... Read more...

Paul A. Anderson, Qiang Dai, Robert J.R. Elliott, Gavin Harper and Viet Nguyen-Tien

1 September 2022

Keywords: technological change ; green growth ; economic geography ; electric vehicles ; circular economy ; supply chain ; transition

Economic Geography:

Creative clusters and creative multipliers: evidence from uk cities.

Economic geographers have paid much attention to the cultural and creative industries, both for their propensity to cluster in urban settings, and their potential to drive urban economic development. However, evidence on... Read more...

Diana Gutierrez-Posada, Tasos Kitsos, Max Nathan and Massimiliano Nuccio

28 July 2022

Keywords: creative industries ; local multipliers ; cities ; local economic development

The Overview:

Has the pandemic changed the workplace forever (podcast).

Millions of US workers are quitting or changing jobs in an ongoing trend dubbed the Great Resignation. With job vacancies rising to record highs on both sides of the Atlantic, is the UK also facing a resignations surge? ... Read more...

Jonathan Wadsworth

27 July 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; covid-19 ; employment ; uk economy ; podcast

UCLA Housing Voice:

Skyscrapers with gabriel ahlfeldt (podcast).

Skyscrapers! We can't help but find them fascinating. Some cities are full of skyscrapers, and others have none. Developers built a 70-story tower on that parcel, but the proposed building just down the street is only 30... Read more...

Keywords: urban ; skyscrapers ; housing ; podcast

Stagnation nation: navigating a route to a fairer and more prosperous Britain

The UK has great strengths, but is over a decade into a period of stagnation. The toxic combination of slow growth and high inequality was posing challenges for low-to-middle income Britain's living standards even before... Read more...

13 July 2022

VoxTalks Economics:

Levelling up europe's left-behind places (podcast).

Recorded live at CEPR Paris Symposium 2022: Inequality isn't just between individuals, but between regions too. Henry Overman explains to Tim Phillips why these disparities exist, why they are so persistent, and whether ... Read more...

8 July 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; inequality ; poverty and income inequality ; welfare state ; podcast

The research university, invention and industry: evidence from German history

We examine the role of universities in knowledge production and industrial change using historical evidence. Political shocks led to a profound pro-science shift in German universities around 1800. To study the consequen... Read more...

Jeremiah Dittmar and Ralph R. Meisenzahl

30 June 2022

Keywords: industrialization ; invention ; universities ; cities

What would it take to level up the UK?

The government's levelling up agenda seeks to reduce disparities across the UK. Policies to boost economic performance will need to attract workers and firms away from London and the South East and improve opportunities ... Read more...

Henry G. Overman and Helen Simpson

27 June 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; social mobility ; uk economy ; levelling up ; equality ; spatial disparity ; labour markets ; policy

The economics of levelling up

There is an economic tension at the heart of the government’s plans for 'levelling up' the UK, according to CEP's research director Henry Overman. He argues that getting serious about helping people to access good job op... Read more...

21 June 2022

Keywords: social mobility ; uk economy ; policy ; levelling up ; economic geography ; equality

Regional Science and Urban Economics:

Introduction to the special issue: "urban economics and history".

Read more...

Laurent Gobillon and Stephan Heblich

Keywords: urban economics

History and urban economics

This article reviews recent literature using insights from history to answer central questions in urban economics. This area of research has seen rapid growth in the past decade, thanks to new technologies that have made... Read more...

Walker Hanlon and Stephan Heblich

Keywords: economic history ; growth ; review ; urban economics ; urbanization

Journal of Urban Economics:

The economics of skyscrapers: a synthesis.

We document that skyscraper growth since the end of the 19th century has been driven by a reduction in the cost of height, increasing urbanization, and rising incomes. These stylized facts guide us in developing a compet... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Jason Barr

Keywords: density ; economics ; height regulations ; history ; skyscraper ; skyscrapers ; urbanization

The Economic Journal:

Gravity and heterogeneous trade cost elasticities.

How do trade costs affect international trade? This paper offers a new approach. We rely on a flexible gravity equation that predicts variable trade cost elasticities, both across and within country pairs. We apply this ... Read more...

Natalie Chen and Dennis Novy

Keywords: free trade agreements ;  gravity equation ;  trade costs ; economic geography

Viewing urban spatial history from tall buildings

Micro-geographic data capturing the spatial distribution of economic activity within cities in history are difficult to access. This paper discusses how tall and durable buildings can be exploited as a source of "big dat... Read more...

Keywords: density ; economics ; history ; skyscrapers ; urban

Journal of Human Resources:

The urban wage premium in imperfect labor markets.

Using administrative data for West Germany, this paper investigates whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first establish that employers possess less wage-settin... Read more...

Boris Hirsch, Elke J. Jahn, Alan Manning and Michael Oberfichtner

1 April 2022

Keywords: urban wage premium ; imperfect labour markets ; monopsony ; search frictions

Wheeler Institute for Business and Development, London Business School:

Harnessing the potential of urbanisation in africa: land and housing policy.

Tanner Regan examines the potential for urban planning to encourage public and private investment in land and infrastructure.... Read more...

Tanner Regan

29 March 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; africa ; investment ; infrastructure ; policy

The Urban Economics of Superdiversity

In the oxford handbook of superdiversity.

This chapter examines the economic impacts of superdiversity in theory and practice, drawing on the experience of the United Kingdom in the early 2000s. Superdiversity has a largely urban footprint, reflecting the afford... Read more...

18 March 2022

Keywords: superdiversity ; cities ; economics ; productivity ; quantification

Economic consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine: views of leading economists

Romesh Vaitilingam reports on the views of leading economists concerning the likely economic consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the responses by the international community.... Read more...

10 March 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; wellbeing ; russia ; ukraine ; trade

Sanctions and the targeting of 'elite' interests: the effectiveness of targeting in the case of Iran

The targeting of elite interests has been at the centre of recent sanctions policies, and will be a major strategic concern as the world responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mirko Draca, Jason Garred, and Nele Wa... Read more...

Mirko Draca, Jason Garred and Nele Warrinnier

4 March 2022

Keywords: economic geography ; trade ; russia ; ukraine ; iran ; sanction

How might Scottish independence affect the costs of international trade?

If Scotland were to become an independent country, there would be a new international border with the rest of the UK. Thomas Sampson considers how additional costs that are inevitably created by borders would affect trad... Read more...

18 February 2022

Keywords: brexit ; economic geography ; uk economy ; trade ; scotland ; independence

Spatial disparities across labour markets

Spatial inequalities in the UK are profound and persistent. In 2019, average wages in London were 60% higher than those in Scarborough and Grimsby. Employment rates ranged from 66% in Skegness and Louth to 90% in Harroga... Read more...

Henry G. Overman and Xiaowei Xu

2 February 2022

Keywords: levelling up ; economic geography ; uk ; policy ; equality ; social mobility ; education and skills

LSE Politics and Policy:

'levelling-up': the government's plans aren't enough to promote economic growth and tackle inequality.

The government's levelling-up plan dodges the hard choices says Henry Overman. Countering the economic forces behind the UK's spatial disparities requires addressing multiple barriers and allowing differing approaches - ... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; uk economy ; equality ; policy

Incubators, accelerators and urban economic development

We combine theory and evidence on incubator and accelerator programmes and their effects on urban economic development. These structured co-working programmes have grown rapidly. However, a rich descriptive literature re... Read more...

Margarida Madaleno, Max Nathan, Henry G. Overman and Sevrin Waights

1 February 2022

Keywords: accelerators ; clusters ; evaluation ; incubators ; urban economic development

Working from home and corporate real estate

As remote working became more common during Covid-19, Antonin Bergeaud, Jean Benoit Eymeoud, Thomas Garcia and Dorian Henricot examine how corporate real-estate market participants adjusted to the growth of teleworking i... Read more...

Antonin Bergeaud, Jean Benoit Eymeoud, Thomas Garcia and Dorian Henricot

18 January 2022

Keywords: covid-19 ; economic geography ; technological change ; working from home ; labour market ; corporate real estate ; office space ; france

Health and Place:

Income-related health inequality in urban china (1991-2015): the role of homeownership and housing conditions.

Unprecedented economic growth has been experienced over the several decades worldwide, but such rapid economic growth wasn't accompanied by equally-substantial improvement in health, especially health inequalities betwee... Read more...

Andrew E. Clark, Conchita D'Ambrosio, Lanlin Ding and Peng Nie

1 January 2022

Keywords: decomposition ; homeownership ; housing conditions ; income-related health inequality ; urban china ; wellbeing

Cambridge Journal of Economics:

Profitability of small- and medium-sized enterprises in marshall’s time: sector and spatial heterogeneity in the nineteenth century.

New data on profit heterogeneity of small- and medium-sized firms for 1861–81 in England and Wales are used to reinterpret Marshall's contemporary insights. Profit level differences are chiefly explained by location, mai... Read more...

Robert J Bennett, Piero Montebruno, Harry Smith and Carry van Lieshout

Keywords: census ; employers ; entrepreneurship ; small businesses ; economic geography

Urban Studies: Forthcoming

The city and the virus.

Cities around the world are the epicentres of the coronavirus pandemic: both in the first wave, as the disease spread from East Asia, and now, as many countries enter a third wave of infections. These spatial patterns ar... Read more...

17 December 2021

Keywords: cities ; coronavirus ; inequalities ; labour markets ; urban governance

Land Economics:

Valuing the environmental benefits of canals and canal restoration using house prices.

This article values the environmental benefits of historic, navigable canals using property values. We improve on standard methods by controlling for microgeographic fixed effects and applying a difference-in-differences... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Cong Peng and Cheng Keat Tang

1 November 2021

Keywords: canals ; waterways ; house prices ; environment ; valuation ; cities

Land Economics: Forthcoming

Urban land use fragmentation and human wellbeing.

We study how land use fragmentation affects the life satisfaction of city dwellers. To this end, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on exact geographical coordinates of land use from the European Urban Atlas and of... Read more...

Christine Bertram, Jan Goebel, Christian Krekel and Katrin Rehdanz

Keywords: urban land use ; urban land use fragmentation ; subjective wellbeing ; life satisfaction ; spatial analysis ; soep ; gis

Pandemic shock and economic divergence: political economy before and after the black death

We document how the Black Death activated politics and led to economic divergence within Europe. Before the pandemic, economic development was similar in Eastern and Western German cities despite greater political fragme... Read more...

Luis Bosshart and Jeremiah Dittmar

22 October 2021

Keywords: institutions ; political economy ; structural change ; cities ; growth

Rising sea levels and the future of coastal cities

Despite the higher susceptibility to floods and a growing climate crisis, more than 10% of the world's population lives in low-elevation coastal zones - and that share is increasing. Guy Michaels and colleagues present a... Read more...

Guy Michaels

15 October 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; climate ; climate change ; housing ; inequality ; equality ; cities ; sea level rise

Landscape and Urban Planning:

Urban green is more than the absence of city: structural and functional neural basis of urbanicity and green space in the neighbourhood of older adults.

The relationship between urbanization, the brain, and human mental health is subject to intensive debate in the current scientific literature. Particularly, since mood and anxiety disorders as well as schizophrenia are k... Read more...

Sandra Duzel, Peter Eibich, Jurgen Gallinat, Jan Goebel, Jens Kolbe, Christian Krekel, Simone Kuhn, Ulman Lindenberger, Anna Mascherek and Gert G. Wagner

1 October 2021

Keywords: brain structure ; mri ; urban fabric ; urban green ; urbanicity

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Of mice and merchants: connectedness and the location of economic activity in the iron age.

We study the causal relationship between geographic connectedness and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the... Read more...

Jan David Bakker, Stephan Maurer, Jörn-Steffen Pischke and Ferdinand Rauch

Keywords: urbanization ; locational fundamentals ; trade

Suburbanization in the USA, 1970-2010

The second half of the 20th century saw large-scale suburbanization in the USA, with the median share of residents who work in the county where they live falling from 87% to 71% between 1970 and 2000. We introduce a new ... Read more...

19 August 2021

Keywords: commuting ; numerical model ; residential location ; suburbanization ; urban history ; workplace ; united states

Cities and regions

Economic prosperity is very unevenly distributed across space. What causes some places to be richer and some poorer? Why do these spatial disparities matter - and what can policy do to reduce them? Economists studying ur... Read more...

10 August 2021

Keywords: insights ; economic geography ; cities ; regions ; spatial disparities

Consumer city: evidence from smartphone data

Traditional theories emphasise production decisions and the commuting costs of workers in shaping the spatial concentration of economic activity in cities. However, much of urban travel is related to consumption of non-t... Read more...

Yuhei Miyauchi, Kentaro Nakajima and Stephen J. Redding

4 August 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; technological change ; cities ; transport ; consumerism ; labour markets

We develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model with forward-looking investment and migration decisions. We characterize analytically the transition path of the spatial distribution of economic activity in respons... Read more...

28 July 2021

Keywords: spatial dynamics ; economic geography ; trade ; migration

CEP Covid-19 analysis

City of dreams no more, a year on: worklessness and active labour market policies in urban india.

This report provides key findings from a new field survey to assess the long-term impact of Covid-19 on urban workers in low-income areas of India. The survey took place during February and March 2021, just before the s... Read more...

Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli

2 July 2021

Keywords: covid-19 ; urban india ; unemployment

Journal of Political Economy:

Are bigger banks better firm-level evidence from germany.

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in postwar Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after ... Read more...

Kilian Huber

1 July 2021

Keywords: bank regulation ;  big banks ;  bank size ;  economic growth ;  brexit ;  economic geography ;  employment ;  globalisation ;  productivity ;  technological change

Economics Letters:

Gravity model estimates of the spatial determinants of trade, migration, and trade-and-migration policies.

Using a gravity model, we explore the effects of distance and borders on trade, migration, and trade-and-migration policies and document three key differences between trade and migration patterns in otherwise equivalent ... Read more...

Rebecca Freeman and John Lewis

Keywords: economic geography ; immigration ; distance puzzle ; freedom-of-movement agreements ; globalization ; migration ; regional trade agreements ; gravity estimates

Planning Ahead for Better Neighborhoods: Long-Run Evidence from Tanzania

Africa’s demand for urban housing is soaring, even as it faces a proliferation of slums. In this setting, can modest infrastructure investments in greenfield areas where people subsequently build their own houses facilit... Read more...

Neeraj Baruah, Amanda Dahlstrand, Guy Michaels, Dzhamilya Nigmatulina, Ferdinand Rauch and Tanner Regan

Keywords: urban economics ; economic development ; slums ; africa

Reflections on struggling high streets

Henry Overman reflects on the findings from the What Works Centre's Recovery Workshop focusing on the British high street, looking at how an economic recovery from the pandemic focused on policy may best help our high st... Read more...

19 June 2021

Keywords: covid-19 ; economic geography ; trade ; growth ; policy ; business

State capacity and development clusters

The determinants of economic development have been debated for many years. However, some of these determinants have been hard to measure internationally. Tim Besley, Chris Dann and Torsten Persson review evidence from 25... Read more...

Timothy Besley, Chris Dann and Torsten Persson

18 June 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; trade ; development ; conflict ; institutions ; development ; politics ;

UK house prices in Covid-19 times

The pandemic lead to increased demand for bigger homes and gardens. With housing supply limited by strict UK planning regulations and the market propped up by a stamp duty waiver and the furlough scheme, prices of detach... Read more...

Paul Cheshire, Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schöni

15 June 2021

Keywords: covid-19 ; housing ; house prices ; policy ; economic geography

Grantham Institute blogs:

The answer to housing's stubborn carbon emissions problem: green offsets.

Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber propose 'green offsets' to reduce property taxes in a way that is strictly scaled to energy efficiency, as a simple intervention to address the UK's urgent need to reduce its residentia... Read more...

Paul Cheshire and Christian A. L. Hilber

7 June 2021

Keywords: urban ; tax ; housing ; environment ;

Pancakes to pyramids: city form to promote sustainable growth (English)

Towns and cities are economic and social microcosms in which large numbers of people and firms interact. These interactions largely shape how a city looks, how it functions, and how it grows. But how exactly does this ma... Read more...

Somik V. Lall, Mathilde Sylvie Maria Lebrand, Hogeun Park, Daniel M. Sturm and Anthony J. Venables

2 June 2021

Keywords: growth ; economic geography ; environment ; cities ; urban

Suburbanization in the United States 1970-2010

The second half of the twentieth century saw large-scale suburbanization in the United States, with the median share of residents who work in the same county where they live falling from 87 to 71 percent between 1970 and... Read more...

19 May 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; suburbanization ; transportation

LSE Research for the World:

Government urban regeneration initiative failed to improve britain's most deprived areas.

In 1994, John Major's Conservative government launched an initiative to improve a range of societal issues through regeneration. The Single Regeneration Budget ran for nearly a decade, but failed to create opportunities ... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; social mobility ; regeneration ; growth ; policy

Why housing is built in flood-prone coastal areas

Despite the higher susceptibility to floods and a growing climate crisis, more than 10% of the world's population live in low-elevation coastal zones, and that percentage is growing. Yatang Lin, Thomas McDermott and Guy ... Read more...

22 April 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; urban ; enivronment

Construction on low elevation coastal zones is risky for both residents and taxpayers who bail them out, especially when sea levels are rising. We study this construction using spatially disaggregated data on the US Atla... Read more...

13 April 2021

Oxford Review of Economic Policy:

The persistent consequences of adverse shocks: how the 1970s shaped uk regional inequality.

The economic shocks experienced by the UK economy in the 1970s brought major changes in the spatial distribution of employment rates in the UK. This paper traces the long-run implications of these changes, suggesting tha... Read more...

Patricia Rice and Anthony J. Venables

5 April 2021

Keywords: uk economy ; economic geography ; employment

LSE Covid-19:

Why central london has seen the biggest rises in house prices, despite covid.

As many predicted, the pandemic led to a demand for bigger homes and gardens. But with supply limited by Britain's strict planning regulations, and the market propped up by a stamp duty waiver and the furlough scheme, pr... Read more...

31 March 2021

Keywords: covid-19 ; economic geography ; housing market ; housing ; houses ; prices

Business History:

Changes in victorian entrepreneurship in england and wales 1851-1911: methodology and business population estimates.

The full population of England and Wales employers and own-account business proprietors is estimated using population censuses 1851–1911. The main contribution of the article is a method of mixed single imputation to ove... Read more...

30 March 2021

Keywords: census ; employers ; entrepreneurship ; self-employment ; small businesses ; economic geography

Rebuilding Macroeconomics:

Understanding educational progression at the local level: portsmouth, the northern city on the south coast.

Understanding regional inequalities is likely to be key to understanding the UK's overall macroeconomic performance. In this article, Jo Blanden, Hector Espinoza, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura analyse the educatio... Read more...

Jo Blanden, Hector Espinoza, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura

25 March 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; schools ; education ; equality ; policy

The local economic impacts of regeneration projects: Evidence from UK's single regeneration budget

Many governments aim to improve the labour market outcomes of people living in deprived areas through "place-making" initiatives. Economists are often sceptical about the effectiveness of such policies, but empirical evi... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Henry G. Overman and Matti Sarvimäki

1 March 2021

Keywords: employment ; neighbourhoods ; regeneration ; single regeneration budget ; urban policy

The impact of public employment: Evidence from Bonn

This paper evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the creation of the new West German government in Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variati... Read more...

Sascha O. Becker, Stephan Heblich and Daniel M. Sturm

Keywords: economic geography ; german division ; place-based policies ; public employment

Lockdown and the social life of big cities

The effects of Covid-19 on the social lives of city dwellers - being able to go to the pub, restaurants and theatre - may be more relevant for the future of cities than its impact on work. That's the implication of a tho... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

Keywords: covid-19 ; geography ; economic geography ; cities ; employment ;

Will coronavirus cause a big city exodus?

Big cities thrive because of the economic and social benefits of proximity – but proximity also helps to spread Covid-19. Does this mean an end to the urban revival of recent years – or do vaccines herald a return to nor... Read more...

Max Nathan and Henry G. Overman

Keywords: covid-19 ; economic geography ; housing markets ; innovation ; labour

Consumption access and agglomeration: evidence from smartphone data

We provide new theory and evidence on the role of consumption access in understanding the agglomeration of economic activity. We combine smartphone data that records user location every 5 minutes of the day with economic... Read more...

18 February 2021

Keywords: agglomeration ; urbanization ; transportation

LSE US Centre:

Trade protection along supply chains: how antidumping measures against china hurt downstream industries.

Production processes are often no longer confined to a single country; supply chains can be fragmented across great distances. By contrast, tariffs are often used by individual countries to protect certain industries. In... Read more...

Chad Bown, Paola Conconi, Aksel Erbahar and Lorenzo Trimarchi

10 February 2021

Keywords: economic geography ; supply chains ; usa ; china ; policy ; tax ; production ; employment ; wages ; investment ; sales ; trade

Bloomberg Stephanomics Podcasts:

The economic cost of covid-19's mental health crisis.

Richard Layard talks about why the coronavirus should make us rethink how we treat mental illness, how "building back better" should mean services rather than roads and railways, and why money really doesn't make us happ... Read more...

Richard Layard

13 January 2021

Keywords: covid-19 ; wellbeing ; policy ; public policy ; infrastructure

Quantifying the externalities of renewable energy plants using wellbeing data: the case of biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, o... Read more...

Christian Krekel, Julia Rechlitz, Johannes Rode and Alexander Zerrahn

16 December 2020

Keywords: renewables ; biogas ; externalities ; social acceptance ; wellbeing ; spatial analysis ; economic geography

Lockdown shows us it is not work that attracts us to big cities - but the social life

Covid-19's effect on the social lives of city dwellers - being able to meet at the pub, restaurants or theatre - may be more relevant for the future of cities than its impact on work, write Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald,... Read more...

11 December 2020

Quality of life in a dynamic spatial model

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatia... Read more...

10 December 2020

Keywords: covid-19 ; dynamic ; housing ; migration ; rents ; pollution ; productivity ; spatial equilibrium ; quality of life ; wages ; welfare ; economic geography ; productivity ; wages ; wellbeing

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in post-war Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after... Read more...

9 December 2020

Keywords: bank regulation ; big banks ; bank size ; economic growth ; brexit ; economic geography ; employment ; globalisation ; productivity ; technological change

All aboard: the effects of port development

Seaports facilitate the fast flow of goods across space, but ports also entail local costs borne by host cities. We use the introduction of containerized shipping to explore the effects of port development. At the local ... Read more...

César Ducruet, Réka Juhász, Dávid Krisztián Nagy and Claudia Steinwender

8 December 2020

Keywords: ports ; containerization ; quantitative economic geography ; endogenous trade costs

In brief... Economics of skyscrapers

Many tall buildings appear to be out of scale given contemporary perceptions. But according to Gabriel Ahlfeldt and Jason Barr, the vast majority have a solid economic case for their construction.... Read more...

2 November 2020

Keywords: density ; economics ; history ; skyscraper ; urban ; cities

In brief... City of dreams no more: Covid-19 in urban India

The pandemic has decimated livelihoods in urban India and created a new underclass of workers who are being pushed into poverty. A CEP report by Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli calls for a national w... Read more...

Shania Bhalotia, Swati Dhingra and Fjolla Kondirolli

Keywords: india ; urban workers ; cities ; growth ; covid-19

The impact of public employment: evidence from West Germany's post-war capital Bonn

Raising the level of public employment is a frequently used policy instrument to support economically lagging regions. This column evaluates the impact of changes in public employment on private sector activity using the... Read more...

1 November 2020

Keywords: economic geography ; public employment ; private sector ; west germany ; bonn ; spillovers ; synthetic control

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

The making of the modern metropolis: evidence from london.

Using newly constructed spatially disaggregated data for London from 1801 to 1921, we show that the invention of the steam railway led to the first large-scale separation of workplace and residence. We show that a class ... Read more...

Stephan Heblich, Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

Keywords: economic geography ; transportation ; housing ; infrastructure ; agglomeration ; urbanization

The use of designer reputation to build tall in London

Height exemptions are made easier when a world-famous architect is involved, but the process carries hidden costs, writes Paul Cheshire.... Read more...

27 October 2020

Keywords: economic geography ; urban

Place-based policies and spatial disparities across European cities

Spatial disparities in income levels and worklessness in the European Union are profound, persistent and may be widening. We describe disparities across metropolitan regions and discuss theories and empirical evidence th... Read more...

Maximilian v. Ehrlich and Henry G. Overman

12 October 2020

Keywords: place based policy ; cities ; european union

Transport infrastructure expenditure: while there is no strong evidence of significant regional differences, the data available is problematic

The UK government uses a Value for Money framework to help allocate infrastructure expenditure. At the core of this is a benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR), calculated using a set of established monetised impacts and costs. Yet... Read more...

8 October 2020

Keywords: economic geography ; inequality ; infrastructure

Prime locations

We harness big data to detect prime locations - large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services - in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Thilo N. H. Albers and Kristian Behrens

5 October 2020

Keywords: prime services ; internal city structure ; agent-based model ; multiple equilibria and path dependence ; transport networks ; cities ; economic geography

The crisis and job guarantees in urban India

This paper uses a new field survey of low-wage areas of urban India to show that employment and earnings were decimated by the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. It examines workers’ desire for a job guarantee ... Read more...

Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin

30 September 2020

Keywords: job guarantee ; india ; urban labour markets ; job vignettes ; covid-19

Benefits, costs, and 'levelling up'

Henry Overman examines how transport infrastructure can play an important role in the economic performance of national and local economies. Reducing transport costs for businesses and commuters, improves access to market... Read more...

25 September 2020

Keywords: economic geography ; infrastructure ;

Big cities thrive because of the economic and social benefits of proximity - but proximity also helps to spread Covid-19. Does this mean an end to the big city revival of recent years? Much will depend on how quickly we ... Read more...

Matthew Clancy, Diane Coyle, Jonathan Dingel, Elena Magrini, Philip McCann, Max Nathan, Henry G. Overman and Helen Simpson

22 September 2020

Keywords: covid-19 ; urban ; economic geography ; productivity

Land tenure and land-use in a developing city: A quantitative spatial model applied to Kampala, Uganda

Land rights and tenure systems are an important factor behind poor housing and inefficient land-use in developing country cities. In Kampala, Uganda, four systems of land tenure coexist, allowing a detailed study of the ... Read more...

Julia Bird and Anthony J. Venables

1 September 2020

Keywords: land-tenure ; land-use ; quantitative spatial model ; uganda ; urban

City of dreams no more: the impact of Covid-19 on urban workers in India

Many developing economies have large informal sectors and growing urban youth populations, who lack basic social protections at work. The CEP surveyed 8,500 workers aged 18 to 40 in urban India to understand their experi... Read more...

Fiscal Studies:

Devolving skills: the case of the apprenticeship grant for employers.

One rationale for devolution is that local decision makers may be well placed to adapt national policies to the local context. We test whether such adaptation helps meet programme objectives in the case of the Apprentice... Read more...

Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Henry G. Overman

1 August 2020

Keywords: economic geography ; apprenticeships ; devolution ; employment

Globalisation and urban polarisation

External trade affects the internal spatial structure of an economy, promoting growth in some cities or regions and decline in others. Internal adjustment to these changes has often proved to be extremely slow and painfu... Read more...

16 July 2020

Keywords: globalisation ; urban ; de-industrialisation ; rustbelt ; polarisation

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:

Ethnolinguistic diversity and urban agglomeration.

This article shows that higher ethnolinguistic diversity is associated with a greater risk of social tensions and conflict, which, in turn, is a dispersion force lowering urbanization and the incentives to move to big ci... Read more...

Ulrich J. Eberle, J. Vernon Henderson, Dominic Rohner and Kurt Schmidheiny

14 July 2020

Keywords: conflict ; democracy ; ethnolinguistic diversity ; fractionalization ; urbanization

This paper provides a synthesis of the state of knowledge on the economics of skyscrapers. First, we document how vertical urban growth has gained pace over the course of the 20th century. Second, we lay out a simple the... Read more...

7 July 2020

Keywords: density ; economics ; history ; skyscraper ; urban

Strategy, investment and policy for a strong and sustainable recovery: an action plan

The UK and the world have suffered disruption and hardship from the COVID-19 pandemic on an immense scale. Together with the tragic consequences of the health crisis, there is now a real risk of protracted global depress... Read more...

Nick Robins, James Rydge, Nicholas Stern, Sam Unsworth, Anna Valero and Dimitri Zenghelis

2 July 2020

Keywords: covid-19 ; sustainable recovery ; investment ; productivity ; infrastructure ; net zero greenhouse emissions ; 'building back better' ; uk economy

Journal of Economic Geography:

Airports, access and local economic performance: evidence from china.

In this article, we study the effect of airports on local economic performance that arises from better access to domestic markets in the context of China’s recent airport network expansion. We measure access through the ... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Wenjie Wu

1 July 2020

Keywords: airports ; china ; local development ; public infrastructure

The effects of supporting local business: evidence from the UK

This paper assesses the effects of a significant place-based intervention that targeted local businesses in deprived areas in the UK. To gain identification, we use data at a fine spatial scale and a regression discontin... Read more...

Elias Einiö and Henry G. Overman

Keywords: uk economy ; employment ; inequality ; economic geography

Urbanization in the developing world: Too early or too slow?

We describe patterns of urbanization in the developing world and the extent to which they differ from the developed world. We consider the extent to which urbanization in the developing world can be explained by conventi... Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson and Matthew A. Turner

1 June 2020

Keywords: urbanisation ; economic development

World Bank Economic Review:

Migration and urbanization in post-apartheid south africa.

Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, little is known about the process of urbanization across the continent. This paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass ... Read more...

Jan David Bakker, Christopher Parsons and Ferdinand Rauch

Keywords: economic geography ; migration ; natural experiment ; urbanization

Spatial disparities in income and worklessness across areas of the European Union are profound and persistent. Concerns about these disparities and the appropriate policy response are longstanding. Two trends have re-ene... Read more...

Keywords: economic geography ; human capital ; skills ; occupational choice ; labor productivity ; wage level and structure ; regional labor markets ; population ; neighborhood characteristics

Damned by dams? Infrastructure and conflict

This study investigates the impact of dams on local conflict across the world with georeferenced location information on dams and conflict events for the years 1989 to 2016. The identification strategy exploits exogenous... Read more...

Ulrich J. Eberle

28 May 2020

Keywords: dams ; infrastructure ; conflict ; civil war ; ethnicity ; fractionalization ; inequality

Journal of Development Economics:

The belt and road initiative: reshaping economic geography in central asia.

This paper develops a computable spatial equilibrium model of Central Asia and uses it to analyze the possible effects of the Belt and Road Initiative on the economy of the region. The model captures international and su... Read more...

Julia Bird, Mathilde Sylvie Maria Lebrand and Anthony J. Venables

Keywords: central asia ; economic geography ; regional integration ; spatial modeling ; transport infrastructure

The role of demand in land re-development

Vacant, previously-developed land in cities can generate negative externalities on surrounding areas, and is often the target of policies to promote re-development. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity ... Read more...

Felipe Carozzi

Keywords: economic geography ; brownfields ; land re-development ; land supply

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Flooded cities.

Does economic activity move away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which displaced more than 650 million people worldwide in the last 35 years. We st... Read more...

Adriana Kocornik-Mina, Thomas K.J. McDermott, Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

1 April 2020

Keywords: urbanization ; flooding ; climate change ; urban recovery

In brief... Swings and silicon roundabouts: does cluster policy work?

Despite scepticism among researchers, policies to promote geographical clusters of firms in the same sector remain popular. Max Nathan evaluates a flagship programme set up a decade ago to accelerate the growth of Tech C... Read more...

2 March 2020

Keywords: cities ; clusters ; technology ; economic development ; synthetic controls

People, places and politics: the challenge of 'levelling up' the UK

As has been much discussed since the election, economic performance varies widely among the towns, cities and regions of the UK. Henry Overman argues that policies to address these spatial disparities should be judged on... Read more...

Keywords: spatial disparities ; skills ; cities ; left-behind places ; 2019 general election

Creative differences? Measuring creative economy employment in the United States and the UK

This paper compares the creative economies of the US and the UK regions and nations using high-quality administrative microdata spanning the period 2011–13. The creative industries are highly urbanized in both countries.... Read more...

Thomas Kemeny, Max Nathan and Peter O'Brien

1 March 2020

Keywords: cities ; creative industries ; creative trident ; cross-country analysis ; labour markets ; occupations

CEP Urban and Spatial Programme Blog:

Housing: 'no shortage' - is it nonsense.

Paul Cheshire questions arguments that Britain is not suffering from a housing shortage, pointing out errors in common understanding.... Read more...

1 December 2019

Keywords: economic geography ; housing ; policy

People, places and politics

Economic performance varies widely between the towns, cities and regions of the UK. On some measures, this variation has widened since the financial crisis. These disparities have already proved to be a key theme in the ... Read more...

22 November 2019

Journal of International Economics:

Geography, competition, and optimal multilateral trade policy.

How should multilateral trade policy be designed in a world in which countries differ in terms of market access and technology, and firms with market power differ in terms of productivity? We answer this question in a mo... Read more...

Antonella Nocco, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Matteo Salto

1 September 2019

Keywords: international trade policy ; monopolistic competition ; firm heterogeneity ; pricing to market ; multilateralism ; productivity ; globalisation ; economic geography

Does light touch cluster policy work? Evaluating the tech city programme

Despite academic scepticism, cluster policies remain popular with policymakers. This paper evaluates the causal impact of a flagship UK technology cluster programme. I build a simple framework and identify effects using ... Read more...

29 August 2019

Residential mobility in the UK: how distance and local economic conditions drive residential choices

Monica Langella and Alan Manning find that high unemployment in an area induces people to move away, and has an even stronger effect on the attractiveness of that area to potential movers. They also find that younger and... Read more...

Monica Langella and Alan Manning

18 August 2019

Keywords: british and irish politics and policy ; cep ; featured ; lse comment ; economic conditions ; economy ; employment ; immigration ; migration ; moblity ; moving ; opportunity ; regional ; regions ; residential mobility ; unemployment

Measuring urban economic density

At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities. This paper estimates urban agglomeration effects, exploring simple and very nuanced measures of economic densit... Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson, Sebastian Kriticos and Dzhamilya Nigmatulina

14 August 2019

Keywords: agglomeration economies ; cities ; economic density ; economic development ; landscan ; pull forces ; rural-urban migration ; sub-saharan africa ; urbanization

We study whether urban density affects the exposure of city dwellers to ambient air pollution using satellite-derived measures of air quality for the contiguous United States. For identification, we rely on an instrument... Read more...

15 July 2019

Keywords: air pollution ; urban congestion ; density ; health

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Task specialization in u.s. cities from 1880 to 2000.

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using over 3,000 verbs from more than 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro dat... Read more...

Guy Michaels, Ferdinand Rauch and Stephen J. Redding

1 June 2019

Keywords: economic development ; human interaction ; urbanization

Production networks, geography, and firm performance

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships for firm performance. We develop a model in which firms outsource tasks and search for suppliers. Lower search and outsourcing costs lead firms to search... Read more...

Andrew B. Bernard, Andreas Moxnes and Yukiko U. Saito

1 April 2019

Keywords: production networks ; trade ; productivity ; infrastructure ;

The urban wage premium in imperfect labour markets

20 March 2019

Sustainable growth in the UK

Anna Valero and colleagues urge the UK government to put action on climate change and sustainability at the heart of its growth strategy.... Read more...

Ralf Martin, James Rydge and Anna Valero

1 March 2019

Keywords: growth ; climate ; climate change ; sustainability ; industrial strategy ; productivity ; public policy ; cities ; transportation ; infrastructure ; skills ; innovation ; growth commission

Stephen Redding and colleagues examine how the introduction of steam railways shaped the emerging metropolitan area of London.... Read more...

Keywords: railways ; cities ; london ; agglomeration ; urbanization ; transportation

Trade and growth in the Iron Age

Stephan Maurer and colleagues investigate the growth effects of one of the first trade expansions in history: the crossing of the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians ... Read more...

Keywords: growth ; trade ; urbanization ; locational fundamentals

In brief... What the Berlin Wall can teach us about urban development

Award-winning CEP research considers what can be learned from the division and reunification of Berlin.... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf

Keywords: reunification ; berlin ; agglomeration ; dispersion ; density ; cities

CEP industrial strategy paper

Sustainable growth in the uk: seizing opportunities from technological change and the transition to a low-carbon economy.

An overarching strategy for sustainable growth is required to address the dual challenges of restoring productivity growth and managing a transition to a low-carbon economy – priorities in both the UK and other G20 count... Read more...

James Rydge, Ralf Martin and Anna Valero

3 December 2018

Keywords: growth ; climate ; climate change ; industrial strategy ; productivity ; public policy ; cities ; transportation ; infrastructure ; skills ; innovation ; growth commission ; uk economy

Journal of Housing Economics:

Institutional settings and urban sprawl: evidence from europe.

This article explores the role of institutional settings in determining spatial variation in urban sprawl across Europe. We first synthesize the emerging literature that links land use policies and local fiscal incentive... Read more...

Maximilian v. Ehrlich, Christian A. L. Hilber and Olivier Schöni

1 December 2018

Keywords: decentralization ; europe ; housing supply ; land use regulation ; supply constraints ; urban sprawl

Housing in Europe: A different continent – A continent of differences

This article provides the introduction to the special issue on ‘Housing in Europe: a different continent – a continent of differences’ in the Journal of Housing Economics in 2018. Europe is a large continent with a long ... Read more...

Keywords: affordability ; credit conditions ; europe ; institutional settings ; land and housing markets ; monetary policy ; privatization ; regulation ; relationship lending ; social housing ; tenure ; urban sprawl

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Tall buildings and land values: height and construction cost elasticities in chicago, 1870-2010.

Despite unprecedented vertical growth in large cities, the economics of skyscrapers remain understudied. We combine data on tall buildings with a panel of land prices covering 140 years to analyze the determinants of urb... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Daniel P. McMillen

Keywords: cities ; chicago ; density ; height ; land value ; skyscraper

Review of International Economics:

Globalization and urban polarization.

5 November 2018

Does additional spending help urban schools? An evaluation using boundary discontinuities

This study exploits spatial anomalies in school funding policy in England to provide new evidence on the impact of resources on student achievement in urban areas. Anomalies arise because the funding allocated to Local E... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons, Sandra McNally and Martina Viarengo

1 October 2018

Keywords: education ; spending ; schools ; urban

Incubators, accelerators and regional economic development

A growing wave of co-location programmes promises to boost growth for young firms. Despite great public and policy interest we have little idea whether such programmes are effective. This paper categorises accelerators a... Read more...

25 September 2018

Keywords: incubators ; accelerators ; entrepreneurship ; clusters ; cities ; economic development

Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the i... Read more...

12 September 2018

Keywords: agglomeration ; urbanization ; transportation ; economic geography

At the heart of urban economics are agglomeration economies, which drive the existence and extent of cities and are also central to structural transformation and the urbanization process. This paper evaluates the use of ... Read more...

6 September 2018

Keywords: cities ; economic density ; africa

Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies

Do high search costs affect the labour market outcomes of jobseekers living far away from jobs? I randomly assign transport subsidies to unemployed youth in urban Ethiopia. Treated respondents increase job search intensi... Read more...

Simon Franklin

1 September 2018

Keywords: experimental study ; labor market ; subsidy system ; transportation system ; unemployment ; urban population ; young population ; ethiopia

Market Potential and Global Growth over the Long Twentieth Century

We examine the evolution of market potential and its role in driving economic growth over the long twentieth century. Theoretically, we exploit a structural gravity model to derive a closed-form solution for a widely-use... Read more...

David S. Jacks and Dennis Novy

Keywords: economic geography ; market potential ; structural gravity ; trade costs ;

Urban Capacity and Economic Output

This report was commissioned by the National Infrastructure Commission as part of the evidence base for the National Infrastructure Assessment. The views expressed and recommendations set out in this report are the autho... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Daniel J. Graham

9 August 2018

Keywords: spatial economy ; output ; large cities

The spatial impacts of a massive rail disinvestment program: the Beeching axe

Transport investment is a popular policy instrument and many recent studies have investigated whether new infrastructure generates economic benefits and has spatial economic impacts. Our work approaches the question diff... Read more...

6 August 2018

Keywords: rail ; infrastructure ; beeching

Market potential and global growth over the long twentieth century

20 July 2018

Keywords: economic geography ; market potential ; structural gravity ; trade costs

Of mice and merchants: trade and growth in the Iron Age

We study the causal connection between trade and development using one of the earliest massive trade expansions: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenicians. We cons... Read more...

12 July 2018

Urbanisation in developing economies: Building cities that work

This paper reviews recent work on the economics of fast growing developing country cities, with a focus on Africa. It sets out some of the broad facts about African urbanisation and summarises two recent pieces of resear... Read more...

11 May 2018

Keywords: africa ; development ; urbanisation

Who gets the urban surplus?

High productivity in cities creates an economic surplus relative to other areas. How is this divided between workers and landowners? Simple models with homogenous labour suggest that it accrues largely-or entirely-in the... Read more...

Paul Collier and Anthony J. Venables

Keywords: cities ; land rent ; productivity ; sorting ; wages

Does gentrification displace poor households? An 'identification-via-interaction' approach

My theoretical model motivates an ‘identification-via-interaction’ (IvI) approach that separates the causal impact of gentrification on poor exits from endogenous channels. In the empirical analysis, I create a measure o... Read more...

Sevrin Waights

16 April 2018

Keywords: neighbourhood change ; mobility ; turnover ; causality ; cities ; urban ; housing

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

One or many cohesion policies of the european union on the diverging impacts of cohesion policy across member states.

Do regions in all Member States (MSs) of the European Union (EU) benefit from Cohesion Policy? Are regional impacts persistently diversified across countries? In order to answer these questions this paper explores how th... Read more...

Riccardo Crescenzi and Mara Giua

22 February 2018

Keywords: cohesion policy ; european union ; regions ; growth ; employment

Resetting the Urban Network: 117-2012

Do fixed geographic features such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse o... Read more...

Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch

1 February 2018

Keywords: economic geography ; economic history ; path dependence ; transportation

The Impact of Public Employment: Evidence from Bonn

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous varia... Read more...

4 January 2018

Keywords: economic geography ; public employment ; place-based policies ; german division

Colonial Legacies: Shaping African Cities

Differential institutions imposed during colonial rule continue to affect the spatial structure and urban interactions in African cities. Based on a sample of 318 cities across 28 countries using satellite data on built ... Read more...

Neeraj Baruah, J. Vernon Henderson and Cong Peng

7 November 2017

Keywords: colonialism ; persistence ; africa ; sprawl ; urban form ; urban planning ; leapfrog

A review of volume 5 of the Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics

[No abstract available]... Read more...

Keith Head, Thierry Mayer and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

1 November 2017

Keywords: literature review ; regional economy ; urban economy

Life in a slum: Understanding living conditions in Nairobi's slums across time and space

This paper overviews the role of slums in urban Africa, focusing on Nairobi. It reveals the characteristics of slums and how these have changed over time. Spatially disaggregated data show that slum areas are very dense ... Read more...

Julia Bird, Piero Montebruno and Tanner Regan

1 October 2017

Keywords: housing ; informal settlements ; urban

Planning Ahead for Better Neighborhoods: Long Run Evidence from Tanzania

What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study "Sites and Services" projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during ... Read more...

27 September 2017

The Local Economic Impacts of Regeneration Projects: Evidence from UK's Single Regeneration Budget

We study the local economic impacts of a major regeneration programme aimed at enhancing the quality of life of local people in deprived neighbourhoods in the UK. The analysis is based on a panel of firm and area level d... Read more...

4 August 2017

Keywords: single regeneration budget ; regeneration ; employment ; neighbourhoods ; urban policy

Annual Review of Economics:

Quantitative spatial economics.

The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until the pa... Read more...

Stephen J. Redding and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

1 August 2017

Keywords: agglomeration ; cities ; economic geography ; quantitative models ; spatial economics

Journal of Technology Transfer:

Academic inventors: collaboration and proximity with industry.

This paper addresses a number of fundamental research questions on university-industry (U-I) collaborations. Are U-I collaborations intrinsically different from other forms of collaboration, such as inter-firm or inter-u... Read more...

Riccardo Crescenzi, Andrea Filippetti and Simona Iammarino

Keywords: innovation ; institutional and geographical proximity ; regions ; university-industry collaboration

Airports and economic performance in China

China’s airport construction policy has been successful in boosting manufacturing output, according to research by Stephen Gibbons and Wenjie Wu. Their study also finds that productivity impacts have been greater for pri... Read more...

3 July 2017

Keywords: airports ; infrastructure ; productivity ; china

The Compact City in Empirical Research: A Quantitative Literature Review

The ‘compact city’ is one of the most prominent concepts to have emerged in the global urban policy debate, though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent its theorised positive outcomes can be substantiated by evide... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt and Elisabetta Pietrostefani

22 June 2017

Keywords: compact ; city ; density ; meta-analysis ; sustainability ; urban

The UK's Regional Divide: Can Policy Make a Difference

There are large variations in economic performance across the cities and regions of the UK. There is a broad North-South pattern to these disparities. But there is also substantial variation within those broad areas: som... Read more...

2 June 2017

Keywords: regional divide ; cities ; devolution deals

The UK's New Industrial Strategy

‘Industrial strategy’ has returned to the policy agenda, with the government recently setting out its plans in a Green Paper, and dedicated sections appearing in the election manifestos of all three main parties. Until r... Read more...

Anna Valero

26 May 2017

Keywords: uk 2017 general election ; industrial strategy ; skills ; infrastructure ; productivity ; growth ; industrial strategy

Urban economics for the developing World: An introduction

This is an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Urban Economics on “Urbanization in Developing Countries: Past and Present”. We argue that the rapid urbanization and the rise of cities in the developing wo... Read more...

Edward L. Glaeser and J. Vernon Henderson

1 March 2017

Keywords: development economics ; urban economics

Political favoritism in China's capital markets and its effect on city sizes

This paper examines political favoritism of cites in national capital markets and the effect of that favoritism on city sizes. The paper estimates the city-by-city variation in the prices of capital across cities in Chin... Read more...

Wei Cai, Yi Chen and J. Vernon Henderson

Keywords: capital market distortions ; china ; city size ; political favoritism ; urban bias

Airports, Market Access and Local Economic Performance: Evidence from China

In this paper we study the effect of airports on local economic performance that arises from better access to domestic markets, using China’s recent rapid air network expansion. We estimate the effects of the implied cha... Read more...

6 February 2017

The Economic Effects of Density: A Synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 202 estimates of density elasticities from 102 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not be... Read more...

31 January 2017

Keywords: compact ; city ; density ; meta-analysis ; elasticity ; urban

Global investments and regional development trajectories: the missing links

Global investments and regional development trajectories: the missing links. Regional Studies. Regional economic development has been long conceptualized as a non-linear, interactive and socially embedded process: these ... Read more...

Riccardo Crescenzi and Simona Iammarino

1 January 2017

Keywords: europe ; foreign direct investment (fdi) ; local–global connectivity ; regional development ; regions

Spatial frictions

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We deve... Read more...

Kristian Behrens, Giordano Mion, Yasusada Murata and Jens Südekum

Keywords: city-size distribution ; markups ; productivity ; trade frictions ; urban frictions

Agglomeration externalities and urban growth controls

How can land use policy enhance the exploitation of external urban agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we show that the second-best land use policy constrains city creation, while subsidizing (t... Read more...

Wouter Vermeulen

Keywords: agglomeration externalities ; growth controls ; second-best policy ; systems of cities ; urban sprawl

Innovation, SMEs and the liability of distance: The demand and supply of bank funding in UK peripheral regions

This article considers geographical variations in the demand and supply of bank finance for innovative firms in the UK. It uses a detailed survey on the finances of almost 40,000 UK Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises fo... Read more...

Ross Brown and Neil Lee

Keywords: finance ; innovation ; peripheral regions ; smes ; thin markets

Urban renewal after the Berlin wall: A place-based policy evaluation

We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of a spatially targeted renewal policy implemented in Berlin, Germany, in the aftermath of the city's division during the Cold War period. Our results sugg... Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Wolfgang Maennig and Felix J. Richter

Keywords: berlin ; placed-based policy evaluation ; quasi-experiment ; real estate ; redevelopment ; renewal ; revitalization ; urban

Has climate change driven urbanization in Africa?

This paper documents strong but differentiated links between climate and urbanization in large panels of districts and cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has dried substantially in the past fifty years. The key dimensio... Read more...

Uwe Deichmann, J. Vernon Henderson and Adam Storeygard

Keywords: africa ; climate change ; urbanization

Innovation in Russia: The Territorial Dimension

The debate on Russia’s innovation performance has paid little attention to the role of geography. This article addresses this gap by integrating an evolutionary dimension in an augmented regional knowledge production fun... Read more...

Riccardo Crescenzi and Alexander Jaax

Keywords: brics ; evolutionary economic geography ; innovation ; r&d ; regions ; russia

Environment and Planning A:

Ethnic diversity and business performance: which firms which cities.

A growing literature examines how ethnic diversity influences economic outcomes in cities and inside firms. However, firm–city interactions remain more or less unexplored. Ethnic diversity may help firm performance by in... Read more...

1 December 2016

Keywords: business performance ; cities ; diversity ; ethnic diversity ; firm-level analysis

The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until recent... Read more...

11 October 2016

In brief... Powerhouse of cards?

It is not yet clear whether the UK government’s commitment to a ‘Northern Powerhouse’ will survive the change of personnel at the top. But as Neil Lee explains, the idea of seeking to reduce regional disparities via spat... Read more...

4 October 2016

Keywords: regional disparities ; northern powerhouse ; george osborne ; infrastructure ; investment ; devolution

In brief... Investing in roads

Between 1990 and 2010, China constructed an extensive modern road network, including a national system of limited access highways. Vernon Henderson and colleagues investigate the impact on the growth of Chinese cities an... Read more...

Nathaniel Baum-Snow, Loren Brandt, J. Vernon Henderson, Matthew A. Turner and Qinghua Zhang

Keywords: construction ; china ; ricardian trade models ; primate cities

Impact of Structural Reforms on Regional Growth: Distance to the Frontier Matters

This paper aims to understand the impact of nation-wide structural policies on the productivity growth of OECD regions. In particular we explore how this impact varies with the productivity gap of regions with their coun... Read more...

Sabine D'Costa, Enrique Garcilazo and Joaquim Oliveira Martins

29 July 2016

Keywords: structural reforms ; regional growth ; lagging regions

Production networks, geography and firm performance

This paper examines the importance of buyer-supplier relationships, geography and the structure of the production network in firm performance. We develop a simple model where firms can outsource tasks and search for supp... Read more...

14 June 2016

Keywords: production networks ; trade ; productivity ; infrastructure

Location, Search Costs and Youth Unemployment: Experimental Evidence from Transport Subsidies in Addis Ababa

Do high search costs affect the labour market outcomes of job seekers living far away from jobs? I randomly assign transport subsidies to unemployed youth in urban Ethiopia. Treated respondents increase job search intens... Read more...

26 May 2016

Keywords: job search ; spatial mismatch ; unemployment ; cash constraints ; urban ; transpor

Building the City: Urban Transition and Institutional Frictions

We model the building of a city, estimate parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses from institutional frictions encountered in changing land-use. We distinguish formal and slum construction technologies; in ... Read more...

J. Vernon Henderson, Tanner Regan and Anthony J. Venables

27 April 2016

Keywords: city ; urban ; urban growth ; slums ; urban structure ; urban form ; housing investment ; capital durability

Subways and Urban Growth: Evidence from Earth

We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city’s subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. To accomplish this investigation, for the 632 largest cities in the world, we construct panel d... Read more...

Marco Gonzalez-Navarro and Matthew A. Turner

Keywords: subways ; public transit ; urban growth ; urban decentralization

Why Governments Won't Invest

The UK Government is currently exerting a sharp and tightening squeeze on public investment at a time when borrowing for public investment has never, historically, been cheaper with interest rates close to zero in real t... Read more...

Sir Vince Cable

17 March 2016

Keywords: uk economy ; public investment ; public debt ; government policy ; infrastructure

One Mandarin benefits the whole clan: hometown favoritism in an authoritarian regime

We study patronage politics in authoritarian Vietnam, using an exhaustive panel of 603 ranking officials from 2000 to 2010 to estimate their promotions’ impact on infrastructure in their hometowns of patrilineal ancestry... Read more...

Quoc-Anh Do, Kieu-Trang Nguyen and Anh N. Tran

24 February 2016

Keywords: favoritism ; patronage ; authoritarian regime ; political connection ; hometown ; infrastructure ; distributive politics

Economic activity tends to return to flood-prone areas after floods rather than relocating to higher ground. What’s more, cities built in flood-prone areas are locking in exposure to flood risk for the long term. These a... Read more...

22 February 2016

Ecological Economics:

The greener, the happier the effect of urban land use on residential well-being.

We investigate the effect of urban land use on residential well-being in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas. We reduce concerns... Read more...

Jens Kolbe, Christian Krekel and Henry Wustermann

1 January 2016

Keywords: abandoned areas ; european urban atlas ; forests ; german socio-economic panel ; green urban areas ; life satisfaction ; monetary valuation ; spatial analysis ; urban land use ; waters

Does economic activity relocate away from areas that are at high risk of recurring shocks? We examine this question in the context of floods, which are among the costliest and most common natural disasters. Over the past... Read more...

17 December 2015

Commuting, migration and local employment elasticities

Many changes in the economic environment are local, including policy changes and infrastructure investments. The effect of these changes depends crucially on the ability of factors to move in response. Therefore a key ob... Read more...

Ferdinando Monte, Stephen J. Redding and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

11 November 2015

Keywords: commuting ; migration and local employment elasticities

The economics of density: evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empi... Read more...

1 November 2015

What Makes Cities More Productive? Agglomeration Economies and the Role of Urban Governance: Evidence from 5 OECD Countries

This paper estimates agglomeration benefits across five OECD countries, and represents the first empirical analysis that combines evidence on agglomeration benefits and the productivity impact of metropolitan governance ... Read more...

Rudiger Ahrend, Emily Farchy, Ioannis Kaplanis and Alexander C. Lembcke

13 July 2015

Keywords: cities ; productivity ; governance ; agglomeration economies

Spillovers from Immigrant Diversity in Cities

Using comprehensive longitudinal matched employer-employee data for the U.S.,this paper provides new evidence on the relationship between productivity and immigration-spawned urban diversity. Existing empirical work has ... Read more...

Abigail Cooke and Thomas Kemeny

15 June 2015

Keywords: immigrants ; diversity ; productivity ; spillovers ; cities

#ElectionEconomics: The Research Evidence on Key Issues for Voters in the 2015 UK General Election

Please see the CEP #ElectionEconomics report(Paper 1)and the Executive Summary (Paper 2) that cover all the election 2015 briefings, discussing the research evidence on 15 of the UK's key policy battlegrounds: immigratio... Read more...

Ghazala Azmat, Brian Bell, Jonathan Colmer, Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Swati Dhingra, Christian A. L. Hilber, Stephen Machin, Alan Manning, Ralf Martin, Alistair McGuire, Sandra McNally, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Henry G. Overman, Isabelle Roland, Thomas Sampson, Anna Valero, John Van Reenen, Jonathan Wadsworth, Gill Wyness and Gabriel Zucman

30 April 2015

Keywords: 2015 uk general election ; government policy ; austerity ; productivity ; health ; nhs ; education ; higher education ; immigration ; brexit ; eu ; inequality ; real wages ; unemployment ; gender ; management ; productivity ; uk housing ; environment ; climate change ; uk cities ; infrastructure ; taxation

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Policy Paper

Planes, trains and automobiles: the economic impact of transport infrastructure.

In the run up to the 2015 general election, the main political parties have very mixed views as to what should be done about transport in the UK. Big transport investment proposals - expansion of London's airports and hi... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons

Revised July 2017

Keywords: transport ; infrastructure ; uk economy

The Economic Performance of UK Cities: Can Urban and Regional Policy Make a Difference to the North-South Divide

There are large variations in economic performance across UK cities and on some measures, they have widened since the global financial crisis. All main parties promise action to reduce them, but there is little differenc... Read more...

26 March 2015

Keywords: uk cities ; urban economies ; recession ; #electioneconomics ; spatial equilibrium ; labour ; housing market ; wages ; regional disparities

The Economic Value of Local Social Networks

The idea that local social capital yields economic benefits is fundamental to theories of agglomeration, and central to claims about the virtues of cities. However, this claim has not been evaluated using methods that pe... Read more...

Frank Ethridge, Maryann Feldman, Thomas Kemeny and Ted Zoller

19 January 2015

Keywords: cities ; economic development ; social networks ; social capital

Urban Development and Air Pollution: Evidence from a Global Panel of Cities

We exploit a unique panel of 75 metro areas (‘cities’) across the globe and employ a city-fixed effects model to identify the determinants of within-city changes in air pollution concentration between 2005 and 2011. Incr... Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Charles Palmer

19 December 2014

Keywords: urbanization ; urban form ; decentralization ; air pollution ; transport ; built environment

City of dreams

Higher ability workers benefit more from bigger cities while housing costs there are higher for everyone, and yet there is little sorting on ability. A possible explanation is that young individuals have an imperfect ass... Read more...

Jorge De la Roca, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Diego Puga

8 October 2014

Keywords: cities ; sorting ; agglomeration ; self-confidence ; learning

Gone with the wind

Wind farms reduce house prices in postcodes where the turbines are visible, according to research by Steve Gibbons. Households are willing to pay £1,000 a year to avoid a large wind farm visible within 2km. His study not... Read more...

3 October 2014

Keywords: housing prices ; environment ; wind farms ; infrastructure

Urban Economics and Urban Policy Challenging Conventional Policy Wisdom Hardcover

In this bold, exciting and readable volume, Paul Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry Overman illustrate the insights that recent economic research brings to our understanding of cities, and the lessons for urban policy-making... Read more...

Paul C. Cheshire, Max Nathan and Henry G. Overman

30 May 2014

Keywords: economic geography ; cities ; urban policy making

Gone with the Wind: Valuing the Visual Impacts of Wind Turbines through House Prices

This study provides quantitative evidence on the local benefits and costs of wind farm developments in England and Wales, focussing on their visual environmental impacts. In the tradition of studies in environmental, pub... Read more...

2 April 2014

Culturally Clustered or in the Cloud? Location of Internet Start-ups in Berlin

Knowledge based firms like IT companies do neither have a capital- nor a land intensive production. They predominantly rely on qualified labour and increasingly depend on the location of its (potential) employees. This i... Read more...

Kristoffer Moeller

19 March 2014

Keywords: firm location ; urban amenities ; consumer city ; internet start-ups ; entrepreneurs ; berlin

Can cities be trapped in bad locations?

After the fall of the Roman Empire, urban life in France became a shadow of its former self, but in Britain it completely disappeared. Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch use these contrasting experiences as a natural exper... Read more...

5 February 2014

Do Inventors Talk to Strangers? On Proximity and Collaborative Knowledge Creation

This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identifi... Read more...

Riccardo Crescenzi, Max Nathan and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

9 January 2014

Keywords: innovation ; patents ; proximities ; cities ; regions ; knowledge spillovers ; collaboration ; ethnicity

LSE European Politics and Policy Blog:

The state of the uk economy: diagnosis, prognosis and recommended treatment.

The UK economy has experienced a prolonged period of weakness over the last five years. John Van Reenen writes that the real problems for the UK are inadequate long-run investment in infrastructure, innovation and human ... Read more...

John Van Reenen

6 January 2014

Keywords: john van reenen ; lse comment ; the euro ; european economics ; finance ; business and regulation ; economic growth ; economics ; infrastructure ; uk ; uk economy ; unemployment

Urban Renewal after the Berlin Wall

Urban renewal areas are popular but empirically understudied spatial planning instruments designed to prevent urban decline and induce renewal. We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of 22 renew... Read more...

18 December 2013

Keywords: urban ; renewal ; revitalization ; redevelopment ; hedonic regression ; quasi-experiment

In brief... Blackout babies: the impact of power cuts on fertility

A rolling blackout in Colombia in the early 1990s led to a rise in unplanned births, according to research by Amar Shanghavi and colleagues. What’s more, young women who became mothers after the blackout had worse outcom... Read more...

Thiemo Fetzer, Oliver Pardo and Amar Shanghavi

10 December 2013

Keywords: fertility ; infrastructure ; blackouts ; unplanned parenthood

Immigrant Diversity and Economic Development in Cities: A Critical Review

This paper reviews a growing literature investigating how ‘immigrant’ diversity relates to urban economic performance. As distinct from the labor-supply focus of much of the economics of immigration, this paper reviews w... Read more...

Thomas Kemeny

29 November 2013

Keywords: diversity ; immigration ; cities ; regional economic performance

Resetting the urban network: 117-2012

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of ... Read more...

27 November 2013

An urban legend?! Power rationing, fertility and its effects on mothers

This paper answers the question whether extreme power rationing can induce changes in human fertility and thus, generate “mini baby booms”. We study a period of extensive power rationing in Colombia that lasted for most ... Read more...

18 November 2013

Here Be Startups: Exploring a young digital cluster in Inner East London

The digital industries cluster known as 'Silicon Roundabout' has been quietly growing in East London since the 1990s. Now rebranded 'Tech City', it is now the focus of huge public and government attention. National and l... Read more...

Max Nathan and Emma Vandore

7 November 2013

Keywords: digital economy ; cities ; clusters ; innovation ; london ; silicon roundabout ; tech city

Trade integration, market size and industrialization: evidence from China's national trunk highway system

Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial ... Read more...

Benjamin Faber

22 October 2013

Keywords: trade integration ; industrialization ; road infrastructure

Cultural Diversity, Cities and Innovation: firm Effects or City Effects?

Growing cultural diversity is seen as important for innovation. Research has focused on two potential mechanisms: a firm effect, with diversity at the firm level improving knowledge sourcing or ideas generation, and a ci... Read more...

11 October 2013

Keywords: cultural diversity ; innovation ; cities ; smes ; migration

Urban Escalators and Inter-regional Elevators: The Difference that Location, Mobility and Sectoral Specialisation make to Occupational Progression

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevato... Read more...

Tony Champion, Mike Coombes and Ian Gordon

25 September 2013

Keywords: escalator region ; labour migration ; elevator effect ; city-regions ; social mobility ; career progression

The economic future of British cities

Henry Overman surveys the evidence on potentially effective responses to the recession and longer-term structural change.... Read more...

27 June 2013

Keywords: cities ; urban economies ; recession

The Urban Wage Growth Premium: Sorting or Learning?

This paper is concerned with the urban wage premium and addresses two central issues about which the field has not yet reached a consensus. First, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas ... Read more...

Sabine D'Costa and Henry G. Overman

17 May 2013

Keywords: urban wage premium ; agglomeration ; cities ; wage growth ; worker mobility

Do Large Departments Make Academics More Productive? Agglomeration and Peer Effects in Research

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department ... Read more...

Clément Bosquet and Pierre-Philippe Combes

23 April 2013

Keywords: productivity determinants ; economic geography ; networks ; economics of science ; selection and endogeneity

How Far Do England’s Second-Order Cities Emulate London as Human-Capital ‘Escalators’?

In the urban resurgence accompanying the growth of the knowledge economy, second-order cities appear to be losing out to the principal city, especially where the latter is much larger and benefits from substantially grea... Read more...

21 March 2013

Keywords: human-capital escalator ; second-order cities ; england ; ons longitudinal study ; career progression ; city region

Top Team Demographics, Innovation and Business Performance: Findings from English Firms and Cities 2008-9

High levels of net migration to the UK have contributed to growing cultural diversity, and researchers are turning their attention to the long-term effects of diversity on productivity. Yet little is known about these is... Read more...

8 March 2013

Keywords: cities ; innovation ; entrepreneurship ; cultural diversity ; migration ; gender

CEO Incentive Contracts in China: Why Does City Location Matter?

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two ... Read more...

Alex Bryson, John Forth and Minghai Zhou

15 February 2013

Keywords: executive compensation ; ceo's ; privatisation ; fdi ; china ; cities

Task Specialization in U.S. Cities from 1880-2000

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs). Using micro-data from t... Read more...

5 February 2013

Specialization and Regional Economic Development

Debates about urban growth and change often center on specialization.However, arguments linking specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be h... Read more...

Thomas Kemeny and Michael Storper

6 December 2012

Keywords: specialization ; diversification ; agglomeration economies ; urban wages

The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical a... Read more...

13 September 2012

Keywords: agglomeration ; dispersion ; density ; cities

28 June 2012

Keywords: agglomeration ; dispersion ; density ; cities ; economic geography

Ambition, Human Capital Acquisition and the Metropolitan Escalator

This paper examines the relation between ambition, as a form of dynamic human capital, and the escalator role of high order metropolitan regions, as originally identified by Fielding (1989). It argues that occupational p... Read more...

Keywords: escalator region ; migration ; urban labour market ; london ; social mobility ; human capital

Is Pennine England becoming more Polycentric or more Centripetal? An Analysis of Commuting Flows in a Transforming Industrial Region, 1981-2001

This paper examines census-derived commuting data for the world’s earliest major urbanindustrial region, now home to 10 million people. Owing its origins to water power from the Pennine rivers, this region now comprises ... Read more...

Tony Champion and Mike Coombes

25 April 2012

Keywords: polycentricity ; multi-scalar ; urbanisation ; commuting ; pennine england

Agglomeration, Trade and Selection

This paper studies how firm heterogeneity in terms of productivity affects the balance between agglomeration and dispersion forces in the presence of pecuniary externalities through a selection model of monopolistic comp... Read more...

Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

29 February 2012

Keywords: agglomeration ; trade ; heterogeneity ; selection ; economic geography

A Note on the Value of Foregone Open Space in Sprawling Cities

Foregone benefits of the open space that is sacrificed through urban sprawl are hard to quantify. We obtain a simple benchmark measure by introducing a demand for trips beyond the urban boundary into the monocentric city... Read more...

Jan Rouwendal and Wouter Vermeulen

2 February 2012

Keywords: urban sprawl ; open space ; growth controls ; outdoor recreation

External Benefits of Brownfield Redevelopment: An Applied Urban General Equilbirum Analysis

Does brownfield redevelopment warrant government support? We explore several external benefits in an urban general equilibrium framework. Preferences are modelled such that demand for housing units in the city is downwar... Read more...

Niels Vermeer and Wouter Vermeulen

17 January 2012

Keywords: brownfield redevelopment ; land use externalities ; urban general equilibrium ; benefit-cost analysis

Spatial Frictions

20 December 2011

Keywords: trade frictions ; urban frictions ; productivity ; city-size distribution ; markups

Agglomeration Externalities and Urban Growth Controls

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a ... Read more...

26 October 2011

Keywords: agglomeration externalities ; growth controls ; second-best policy ; systems of cities

Ethnic Inventors, Diversity and Innovation in the UK: Evidence from Patents Microdata

Ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation systems, especially in high-tech regions like Silicon Valley. Do ‘ethnicity-innovation’ channels exist elsewhere? This paper investigates, using a new panel of UK pa... Read more...

11 October 2011

Keywords: ethnic inventors ; innovation ; patents ; cultural diversity ; diasporas ; cities

A Many-Country Model of Industrialization

We draw attention to the role of economic geography in explaining important cross-sectional facts which are difficult to account for in existing models of industrialization. By construction, closed-economy models that st... Read more...

Holger Breinlich and Alejandro Cuñat

26 September 2011

Keywords: industrialization ; economic geography ; international trade

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Does additional spending help urban schools an evaluation using boundary discontinuities.

Improvement of educational attainment in schools in urban, disadvantaged areas is an important priority for policy – particularly in countries like England which have a long tail at the bottom of the educational distribu... Read more...

8 September 2011

Keywords: urban schools ; education ; resources ;

27 August 2011

Keywords: urban schools ; education ; resources

History and industry location: Evidence from German airports

A central prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that industry location is not uniquely determined by fundamentals. Despite the theoretical prominence of this idea, there is little systematic evidence in su... Read more...

Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf

21 August 2011

Keywords: industry location ; economic geography ; german division ; german reunification

The Effects of Agglomeration on Wages: Evidence from the Micro-Level

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE... Read more...

Bernard Fingleton and Simonetta Longhi

Keywords: urban economics ; new economic geography ; household panel data

Does Cultural Diversity Help Innovation in Cities: Evidence from London Firms

London is one of the world’s major cities, and one of its most diverse. London’s cultural diversity is widely seen as a social asset, but there is little hard evidence on its importance for the city’s businesses. Theory ... Read more...

Neil Lee and Max Nathan

February 2011

Keywords: cities ; innovation ; entrepreneurship ; cultural diversity ; migration ; london

The Economics of Super-Diversity: Findings from British Cities, 2001-2006

British cities have a surprisingly long history of cultural diversity. Recently they have become significantly more multicultural, with ‘super-diversity’ emerging in many urban neighbourhoods. Public interest in these ch... Read more...

Keywords: cities ; demography ; migration ; culture ; cultural diversity ; super-diversity ; urban economies ; growth

The Long Term Impacts of Migration in British Cities: Diversity, Wages, Employment and Prices

British cities are becoming more culturally diverse, with migration a main driver. Is this growing diversity good for urban economies? This paper explores, using a new 16-year panel of UK cities. Over time, net migration... Read more...

Keywords: cities ; migration ; cultural diversity ; labour markets ; productivity ; urban economics

Evolving city systems

In urbanization and development.

Leading scholars in urban economics examine the data and definitions associated with the field, and look in-depth at the economic and social consequences of urbanization. Special focus is given to urban violence, and pla... Read more...

Henry G. Overman and Anthony J. Venables

28 October 2010

Keywords: urban ;

CEP Election Analysis 2010 - The complete Series, discussing research on some of the key policy battlegrounds of the 2010 General Election

Keywords: immigration ; crime ; education ; health ; banks ; finance ; jobs ; unemployment ; macroeconomics ; public finances ; urban renewal ; housing ; inequality ; climate change

Economic Geographers and the Limelight: The Reaction to the 2009 World Development Report

The reaction of economic geographers to the World Bank's World Development Report 2009 – Reshaping Economic Geography – has so far been a corporatist turf-protecting exercise. The report has been dismissed as the work of... Read more...

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

Self-Reinforcing Shocks: Evidence from a Resettlement Policy

i. A completely revised version of this paper is available as SERCDP0080, May 2011.... Read more...

Aki Kangasharju and Matti Sarvimäki

Keywords: economic geography ; agglomeration ; migration

Regional Manufacturing Wages: Dancing to the Tune of Trade Shocks

Firms generally choose to locate their production where profits are maximized. As costs affect profits, trade-offs between two marginal costs – employees’ wages and transport costs – may be important for decisions regard... Read more...

Filipe Lage de Sousa

Keywords: economic geography ; trade shocks ; manufacturing wages

Urban Renewal and Regional Growth: Muddled Objectives and Mixed Progress

Keywords: urban renewal ; housing ; growth

Predicting the Geography of House Prices

Prediction is difficult. In this paper we use panel data methods to make reasonably accurate shortterm ex-post predictions of house prices across 353 local authority areas in England. The issue of prediction over the lon... Read more...

Bernard Fingleton

February 2010

Keywords: new economic geography ; real estate prices ; spatial econometrics ; panel data ; prediction

Agglomeration Elasticities and Firm Heterogeneity

This paper estimates the relationship between agglomeration and multi factor productivity at the one digit industry level and by region using longitudinal firm level data for New Zealand. A key focus of the paper is on m... Read more...

Daniel J. Graham and David C. Maré

Keywords: agglomeration ; urban density ; productivity

The Impact of Aging and Technological Relatedness on Agglomeration Externalities: A Survival Analysis

We study localization, urbanization, and Jacobs’ externality effects on plant survival in Sweden (1970-2004). We focus on two questions: (1) do agglomeration externalities change with the age of plants? (2) using new inf... Read more...

Ron Boschma, Martin Henning and Frank Neffke

November 2009

Keywords: agglomeration externalities ; nursery cities ; cox regression ; aalen ; plant survival ; sweden

The Fluctuating Record of Economic Regeneration in England's Second-Order City Regions, 1984-2007

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, Brist... Read more...

Tony Champion and Alan Townsend

October 2009

Keywords: urban regeneration ; employment data ; city regions ; core cities ; england

Spatial Costs in a Monocentric City (And Implications for Agglomeration)

Using water supply as a model for a wider range of infrastructure services, the effect of a negative exponential density gradient on distribution costs is investigated for four monocentric urban development scenarios: (a... Read more...

Hugh B. Wenban-Smith

Keywords: urbanisation ; spatial analysis ; returns to scale ; water utilities

The Productivity Advantages of Large Cities: Distinguishing Agglomeration from Firm Selection

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two explanations have been offered: agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity) and firm selection (larger cities toughen... Read more...

Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton, Laurent Gobillon, Diego Puga and Sébastien Roux

Keywords: agglomeration ; firm selection ; productivity ; cities

Analysing the Impact of Public Capital Stock Using the NEG Wage Equation: A Panel Data Approach

This paper examines the relationship between the level of public infrastructure and the level of productivity using panel data for the Spanish provinces over the period 1984-2004, a period which is particularly relevant ... Read more...

Bernard Fingleton and Miguel Gómez-Antonio

Keywords: spatial economics ; public infrastructure ; productivity ; panel data ; economic geography

Simulating Wages and House Prices Using the NEG

The paper incorporates house prices within an NEG framework leading to the spatial distributions of wages, prices and income. The model assumes that all expenditure goes to firms under a monopolistic competition market s... Read more...

Keywords: new economic geography ; real estate prices ; spatial econometrics

The Empirics of New Economic Geography

Although a rich and extensive body of theoretical research on new economic geography has emerged, empirical research remains comparatively less well developed. This paper reviews the existing empirical literature on the ... Read more...

Keywords: new economic geography ; market access ; industrial location ; multiple equilibria

Does Urbanisation Affect Rural Poverty? Evidence from Indian Districts

Although the high rate of urbanization and the high incidence of rural poverty are two distinct features of many developing countries, we still do not know the effects of the former on the latter. We address this issue b... Read more...

Massimiliano Calì and Carlo Menon

February 2009

Keywords: rural poverty ; urbanization ; indian districts ; india

Economic Geography: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature

This paper reviews the new economic geography literature, which accounts for the uneven distribution of economic activity across space in terms of a combination of love of variety preferences, increasing returns to scale... Read more...

January 2009

Keywords: new economic geography ; market access ; home market effect ; multiple equilibria

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection and Polarisation

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more prod... Read more...

Kristian Behrens and Frédéric Robert-Nicoud

November 2008

Keywords: entrepreneur heterogeneity ; firm selection ; agglomeration ; income inequalities ; urbanization ; urban systems

Education and Income Inequality in the Regions of the European Union

This paper provides an empirical study of the determinants of income inequality across regions of the EU. Using the European Community Household Panel dataset for 102 regions over the period 1995-2000, it analyses how mi... Read more...

Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Vassilis Tselios

Keywords: income inequality ; educational attainment ; educational inequality ; regions ; europe

Urban Growth Drivers in a Europe of Sticky People and Implicit Boundaries

We investigate urban GDP pc growth across the EU12 using data for functionally defined cities - rather than administrative regions. We test hypotheses on the role of human capital, EU integration and fragmentation of urb... Read more...

Paul Cheshire and Stefano Magrini

Keywords: growth ; cities ; local public goods ; spatial adjustment ; local economic growth

Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe

This paper examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd’s... Read more...

Gilles Duranton, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Richard Sandall

Keywords: institutions ; family types ; education ; social capital ; labor force participation ; economic wealth and dynamism ; regions ; europe

Why Capital does not Migrate to the South: A New Economic Geography Perspective

This paper explains why capital does not flow from the North to the South - the Lucas Paradox - with a New Economic Geography model that incorporates mobile capital, immobile labour, and productively heterogeneous firms.... Read more...

Jang Ping Thia

Keywords: firm heterogeneity ; capital mobility ; economic geography

Survival of the Fittest in Cities: Agglomeration, Selection, and Polarisation

October 2008

Urbanisation and Structural Transformation

This paper presents new evidence on urbanization using sub-county data for the United States from 1880-2000 and municipality data for Brazil from 1970-2000. We show that the two central stylized features of population gr... Read more...

Keywords: urbanisation ; economic development ; urban population ; rural population

Prediction Using Panel Data Regression with Spatial Random Effects

This paper considers some of the issues and difficulties relating to the use of spatial panel data regression in prediction, illustrated by the effects of mass immigration on wages and income levels in local authority ar... Read more...

September 2008

Keywords: panel data ; spatially correlated error components ; economic geography ; spatial econometrics

The Effect of Information and Communication Technologies on Urban Structure

The geographic concentration of economic activity occurs because transport costs for goods, people and ideas give individuals and organisations incentives to locate close to each other. Historically, all of these costs h... Read more...

Y Ioannides, Henry G. Overman, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Kurt Schmidheiny

Keywords: ict ; urban structure ; cross country data

History and Industry Location: Evidence from German Airports

A central prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that industry location is not necessarily uniquely determined by fundamentals. In these models, historical accident or expectations determine which of severa... Read more...

Economic Linkages Across Space

We develop a diagrammatic framework that can be used to study the economic linkages between regions or cities. Hitherto, such linkages have not been the primary focus of either the theoretical or empirical literatures. W... Read more...

Henry G. Overman, Patricia Rice and Anthony J. Venables

Keywords: spatial linkages ; urban systems ; new economic geography ; urban and regional policy

Urban Density and Pupil Attainment

We explore the association between urban density and pupil attainment using three cohorts of pupils in schooling in England. Although – as widely recognised – attainment in dense urban places is low on average, this is n... Read more...

Stephen Gibbons and Olmo Silva

Keywords: urban density and agglomeration ; school choice and competition ; pupil achievement

Firms in International Trade

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differenc... Read more...

Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott

Keywords: economic geography ; international trade

Shifts in Economic Geography and their Causes

This paper analyses some of the forces that are changing the spatial distribution of activity in the world economy. It draws on the 'new economic geography' literature to argue the importance of increasing returns to sca... Read more...

December 2006

Keywords: economic geography ; urbanisation ; world economy ; productivity

Fat City: The Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Obesity

We study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship mo... Read more...

Jean Eid, Henry G. Overman, Diego Puga and Matthew A. Turner

November 2006

Keywords: urban sprawl ; obesity ; selection effects

Causes of sprawl: a portrait from space

We study the extent to which US urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30 x 30 metre c... Read more...

Marcy Burchfield, Henry G. Overman, Diego Puga and Matthew A. Turner

Keywords: economic geography ; urban development ; metropolitan growth ; transport infrastructure

The Review of Economic Studies:

Testing for localization using micro-geographic data.

To study the detailed location patterns of industries, and particularly the tendency for industries to cluster relative to overall manufacturing, we develop distance-based tests of localization. In contrast to previous s... Read more...

Gilles Duranton and Henry G. Overman

1 October 2005

The Log of Gravity

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: the standard practice of interpreting the parameters of log-linearized models ... Read more...

João Santos Silva and Silvana Tenreyro

Keywords: elasticities ; gravity equation ; heteroskedasticity ; jensen's inequality ; poisson regression ; preferential-trade agreements

Cities in the Developing World

Rapid urbanisation is a major feature of developing countries. Some 2 billion more people are likely to become city residents in the next 30 years, yet urbanisation has received little attention in the modern development... Read more...

Agglomeration and the Adjustment of the Spatial Economy

We consider the literatures on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework... Read more...

Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton and Henry G. Overman

Keywords: urban systems ; new economic geography ; urban and regional policy ; diagrammatic exposition

The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence of the importance of market access for economic de... Read more...

Stephen J. Redding and Daniel M. Sturm

Keywords: market access ; economic geography ; german division ; german reunification

Evaluating Urban Transport Improvements: Cost Benefit Analysis in the Presence of Agglomeration and Income Taxation

There is a substantial empirical literature quantifying the positive relationship between city size and productivity. The paper draws out the implications of this productivity relationship for evaluations of urban transp... Read more...

September 2004

Keywords: agglomeration ; productivity ; urban transport

Is There a Market for Work Group Servers? Evaluating Market Level Demand Elasticities Using Micro and Macro Models

This paper contains an empirical analysis demand for “work-group” (or low-end) servers. Servers are at the centre of many US and EU anti-trust debates, including the Hewlett-Packard/Compaq merger and investigations into ... Read more...

Keywords: demand elasticities ; network servers ; computers ; anti-trust

Cities, Matching and the Productivity Gains of Agglomeration

The striking geographical concentration of economic activities suggests that there are substantial benefits to agglomeration. However, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. In this paper we take advantage of a ne... Read more...

Fredrik Andersson, Simon Burgess and Julia Lane

Keywords: urban productivity ; matching ; agglomeration

Zipf's Law for Cities: A Cross Country Investigation

This paper assesses the empirical validity of Zipf¿s Law for cities, using new data on 73 countries and two estimation methods ¿ OLS and the Hill estimator. With either estimator, we reject Zipf¿s Law far more often than... Read more...

Kwok Tong Soo

Keywords: cities ; zipf's law ; pareto distribution ; hill estimator

Economic geography and international inequality

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. We provide evidence that the geography of acces... Read more...

Stephen J. Redding and Anthony J. Venables

1 January 2004

Keywords: economic geography ; economic development ; international trade ; inequality ; globalisation ; wages

The Geography of UK International Trade

This paper examines how the geography of UK international trade has changed since the UK¿s accession to the European Economic Community using a newly constructed data set that gives a detailed breakdown of the UK¿s impor... Read more...

Henry G. Overman and L. Alan Winters

January 2004

Keywords: uk trade ; eec ; economic geography

Buzz: Face-to-Face Contact and the Urban Economy

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an effic... Read more...

Michael Storper and Anthony J. Venables

December 2003

Keywords: agglomeration ; clustering ; urban economics ; face-to-face

Spatial Disparities in Developing Countries: Cities, Regions and International Trade

Spatial inequality in developing countries is due to the natural advantages of some regions relative to others and to the presence of agglomeration forces, leading to clustering of activity. This paper reviews and develo... Read more...

November 2003

Keywords: cities ; spatial disparities ; urbanisation ; developing countries

Communication Externalities in Cities

To identify communication externalities in French cities, we exploit a unique survey recording workplace communication of individual workers. Our hypothesis is that in larger and/or more educated cities, workers should c... Read more...

Sylvie Charlot and Gilles Duranton

Keywords: human capital ; cities ; communication externalities

Trade Shocks and Industrial Location: the Impact of EEC Accession on the UK

This paper combines detailed production data (from the ARD) with international trade data by port to examine the impact of accession to the EEC on the location of UK manufacturing. The paper has two main objectives. The ... Read more...

Keywords: uk manufacturing industry ; eec ; economic geography

Can We Learn Anything from Economic Geography Proper?

Abstract This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than ... Read more...

October 2003

Keywords: economic geography ; geographical economics ; regional science ; relational economic geography

Distance, Skill Deepening and Development: Will Peripheral Countries Ever Get Rich?

This paper models the relationship between countries' distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education, and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both expo... Read more...

Stephen J. Redding and Peter K. Schott

Keywords: economic geography ; human capital ; international inequality ; international trade

Explaining Cross-Country Export Performance: International Linkages and Internal Geography

This paper investigates the determinants of countries' export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries' expo... Read more...

September 2002

Keywords: economic development ; economic geography ; international trade

Factor Price Equalization in the UK?

This paper develops a general test of factor price equalization that is robust to unobserved regional productivity differences, unobserved region- industry factor quality differences and variation in production technolog... Read more...

Andrew B. Bernard, Stephen J. Redding, Peter K. Schott and Helen Simpson

Keywords: elative factor prices ; diversification cones ; technology ; economic geography

Globalization in History: A Geographical Perspective

This paper argues that a geographical perspectie is fundamental to understanding comparative economic development in the context of globalization. Central to this view is the role of agglomeration in productivity perform... Read more...

Nicholas Crafts and Anthony J. Venables

Keywords: globalization ; economic geography ; economic history

From Sectoral To Functional Urban Specialisation

We document and then develop a model explaining and relating changes in firms' organisation and in urban structure. Sharing of business services by headquarters and of sector-specific intermediates by production plants ... Read more...

Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga

September 2001

Keywords: functional specialisation ; cities ; business services ; headquarters

The Spatial Economy Cities, Regions, and International Trade

The authors show how a common approach that emphasizes the three-way interaction among increasing returns, transportation costs, and the movement of productive factors can be applied to a wide range of issues in urba... Read more...

Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables

1 July 2001

Keywords: spatial economy ; economic geography

Economic Geography and International Inequality

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. More than 70% of the variation in per capita in... Read more...

Zipfs Law for Cities: An Empirical Examination

We use data for metro areas in the United States, from the US Census for 1900 û 1990, to test the validity of Zipf's Law for cities. Previous investigations are restricted to regressions of log size against log rank. In... Read more...

Y Ioannides and Henry G. Overman

November 2000

Keywords: urban growth ; zipf's law ; gibrat's law ; estimation of brownian motion

Spatial Evolution of the US Urban System

We test implications of economic geography models for location, size and growth of cities with US Census data for 1900 û 1990. Our tests involve non-parametric estimations of stochastic kernels for the distributions of c... Read more...

Keywords: urban growth ; spatial evolution ; economic geography

Nursery Cities: Urban Diversity, Process Innovation and the Life-Cycle of Products

A simple model of process innovation is proposed, where firms learn about their ideal production process by making prototypes. We build around this a dynamic general equilibrium model, and derive conditions under which d... Read more...

February 2000

Keywords: cities ; diversity ; specialisation ; innovation ; learning ; life-cycle

Internet Cluster Emergence

Internet development holds the promise of transmitting economic value across physical space at zero marginal cost. In such a 'weightless economy', what factors matter for the location of economic activity and thus for ... Read more...

Keywords: distribution dynamics ; economic geography ; internet ; location ; space ; time ; toepitz ; weightless economy

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Economic Geography: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature

Cite this chapter.

• Stephen J. Redding 5 , 6 , 7  

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The uneven distribution of economic activity across space is one of the most striking features of economic life. Perhaps the clearest visual manifestation of this is the emergence and growth of cities. The share of the world’s population living in cities grew from less than one tenth in 1300, to around one sixth in 1900, and to around one half today. Even more striking is the emergence of large metropolitan areas. By 1980 there were more than two million cities with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, and by 1995 15 cities had a population of greater than ten million. 1

This chapter is produced as part of the Globalization Programme of the ESRC-funded Centre for Economic Performance. Financial support under the European Union Research Training Network grant MRTN-CT-2006-035873 is gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful to a number of co-authors and colleagues for insight, discussion and helpful comments, including in particular Tony Venables and also Gilles Duranton, Guy Michaels, Henry Overman, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Peter Schott, Daniel Sturm and Nikolaus Wolf. Nonetheless, I bear sole responsibility for the opinions expressed and any errors.

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Redding, S.J. (2013). Economic Geography: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature. In: Bernhofen, D., Falvey, R., Greenaway, D., Kreickemeier, U. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of International Trade. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30531-1_16

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Economic geography: a critical introduction

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Patrick Bigger, Economic geography: a critical introduction, Journal of Economic Geography , Volume 18, Issue 6, November 2018, Pages 1343–1344, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeg/lby051

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My first introduction to economic geography was in a third-year class midway between the dot com bust and the great recession. The class reading was mostly comprised of 60s spatial science and long-dead German location theorists, supplemented with guest lectures by commercial real-estate agents and golf course managers. It felt so irrelevant that I lost interest in economic geography for half a decade.

Students assigned Barnes and Christophers’ Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction are unlikely to suffer a similar reaction. It is an engaging paean to a discipline and the authors’ enthusiasm for economic geography as a means of interpreting the world, and perhaps even changing it, is palpable. This holds true even when covering material that students may find nap-inducing, like debates in early 20th century economic geography or the continuities between ‘geographical economics’ (e.g. Krugman’s NEG) and ‘business geographies’ (e.g. GPN). The book is divided into two sections, which roughly correspond to the two senses that the book is a ‘critical’ introduction. First, and most innovatively, the authors cast a critical gaze onto economic geography itself throughout the first section. Roughly 60% of the text, the section includes chapters on the scope and history of the discipline, the use (and abuse) of theory, and methods for doing economic geography. The authors do not shy away from the social and economic worlds in which economic geographic thought was produced, nor from the personalities of those who produced it. Indeed, Chapter 7, ‘Unboxing Economic Geography’, uses science studies to discuss how economic geography (dis)functions as a community of practice, warts and all. The book productively surveys the discipline, though some aspects of economic geography are subject to more trenchant critique than others. For example, key thinkers in the business geography camp are held up as exemplars of ‘uncritical’ economic geography, while others who have demonstrably contributed to poor social, cultural and economic outcomes, like Richard Florida, receive light treatment. These criticisms flow from the second sense in which the book is intended to be critical, as the authors aim to provide students with tools to critique the existing economic orders. Schools of thought that do not query the fundamental logics and processes of capitalism are put on the back-burner.

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Economic Geography Overview

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• Physical Geography
• Political Geography
• Country Information
• Key Figures & Milestones
• Urban Geography
• M.A., Geography, California State University - East Bay
• B.A., English and Geography, California State University - Sacramento

Economic geography is a sub-field within the larger subjects of geography and economics. Researchers within this field study the location, distribution, and organization of economic activity around the world. Economic geography is important in developed nations such as the United States because it allows researchers to understand the structure of the area's economy and its economic relationship with other areas around the world. It is also important in developing nations because the reasons and methods of development or lack thereof are more easily understood.

Because economics is such a large topic of study so too is economic geography. Some topics that are considered economic geography include agritourism, the economic development of various countries and gross domestic and gross national products. Globalization is also extremely important to economic geographers today because it connects much of the world's economy.

History and Development of Economic Geography

The field of economic geography continued to grow as European nations later began to explore and colonize different regions around the world. During these times European explorers made maps describing economic resources such as spices, gold, silver and tea that they believed would be found in places like the Americas, Asia and Africa (Wikipedia.org). They based their explorations on these maps and as a result, new economic activity was brought to those regions. In addition to the presence of these resources, explorers also documented the trading systems that the people native to these regions engaged in.

In the mid-1800's farmer and economist, Johann Heinrich von Thünen developed his model of agricultural land use . This was an early example of modern economic geography because it explained the economic development of cities based on land use. In 1933 geographer Walter Christaller created his Central Place Theory that used economics and geography to explain the distribution, size, and number of cities around the world.

By the end of World War II general geographic knowledge had increased considerably. Economic recovery and development following the war led to the growth of economic geography as an official discipline within geography because geographers and economists became interested in how and why economic activity and development was occurring and where it was around the world. Economic geography continued to grow in popularity throughout the 1950s and 1960s as geographers attempted to make the subject more quantitative. Today economic geography is still a very quantitative field that mainly focuses on topics such as the distribution of businesses, market research and regional and global development. In addition, both geographers and economists study the topic. Today's economic geography is also very reliant on geographic information systems (GIS) to conduct research on markets, the placement of businesses and the supply and demand of a given product for an area.

Topics within Economic Geography

Theoretical economic geography is the broadest of the branches and geographers within that subdivision mainly focus on building new theories for how the world's economy is arranged. Regional economic geography looks at the economies of specific regions around the world. These geographers look at local development as well as the relationships that specific regions have with other areas. Historical economic geographers look at the historical development of an area to understand their economies. Behavioral economic geographers focus on an area's people and their decisions to study the economy.

Critical economic geography is the final topic of study. It developed out of critical geography and geographers in this field attempt to study economic geography without using the traditional methods listed above. For example, critical economic geographers often look at economic inequalities and the dominance of one region over another and how that dominance impacts the development of economies.

In addition to studying these different topics, economic geographers also often study very specific themes related to the economy. These themes include the geography of agriculture , transportation , natural resources, and trade as well as topics such as business geography .

Current Research in Economic Geography

Journal of Economic Geography

Each of these articles is interesting because they are very different from one another but they all focus on some aspect of the world's economy and how it works.

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