This chapter reviews the literature dealing with systems of cities and the patterns of development within such systems. It starts with the longstanding question of the distribution of city sizes, both in relation to how this distribution can be described and, given the form that it takes, how...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the "second" and "third" worlds. We adopt the labels "transition" economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and "developing" to refer to countries as...

Recent research into the urban quality of life (QOL) is reviewed and analyzed, with a special emphasis on the estimation of implicit prices of environmental attributes. New work has incorporated traditional concerns of urban theory into QOL analyses, as well as increased our understanding of...

We use applied microeconomics to examine several salient problems of urban transportation: traffic congestion, air pollution, the costs of motor vehicle accidents and the future of public transportation. Throughout this chapter, we focus on analytic methods and findings that bear on current...

This chapter begins with the dimensions of the poverty problem in developing countries, and then deals with conceptual and measurement issues. It next discusses the nature, characteristics and correlates of rural and urban poverty. It looks into the issue of gender and poverty, then turns to the...

This chapter discusses theoretical and applied research in urban economics on decentralized cities, i.e., cities in which employment is not restricted to the central business district. The first section discusses informally the incentives that firms face to suburbanize. The next section...

This chapter reviews the literature on the boundary between urban economics and local public finance, defined as research that considers both a housing market and the market for local public services. The first part of the chapter considers positive theories. This part presents the consensus...

The past half-century has witnessed a dramatic change in the way in which people live. Fifty years ago, only a small proportion of the less developed world lived in cities, and world poverty was overwhelmingly rural. In 1950, less than one-fifth of the population of the "third world" was urban;...

The large research literature in urban labour market analysis is reviewed, with the emphasis ranging from attempts to model aggregate simultaneous interactions between residential and workplace location to more modern econometric work researching individual labour market behaviour. The job...