International trade can have profound effects on domestic institutions. We examine this proposition in the context of medieval Venice circa 800-1600. Early on, the growth of longdistance trade enriched a broad group of merchants who used their newfound economic muscle to push for constraints on...

Increasingly, a small number of low-wage countries such as China and India are involved in innovation - not the `big ideas', but the constant incremental innovations needed to stay ahead in business. We provide some evidence of this and develop a model in which there is a transition from...

The incremental innovations that underlie much of modern economic growth typically involve changes to one or more components of a complex product. This creates a tension. On the one hand, a principal would like an agent to contribute innovative components. On the other hand, ironing out...

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 most likely reflect a failure to properly control for the fact the individuals...

We provide an integrated treatment of the theoretical literature on urban land use inspired by the monocentric model, including extensions that deal with multiple endogenous business centres, various dimensions of heterogeneity, and durable housing. After presenting the theory and distilling its...

Why do cities grow in population, surface area, and income per person? Which cities grow faster and why? To these questions, the urban growth literature has offered a variety of answers. Within an integrated framework, this chapter reviews key theories with implications for urban growth. It then...

Individual earnings are higher in bigger cities. We consider three reasons: spatial sorting of initially more productive workers, static advantages associated with workers' current location, and learning by working in big cities. Using rich administrative data for Spain, we find that workers in...

European regions have experienced a polarisation of their unemployment rates between 1986 and 1996, as regions with intermediate rates have moved towards either extreme. This process has been driven by changes in regional employment, only partly offset by labour force changes. Regions' outcomes...

This paper analyses a model of economic development in which international inequalities in the location of industry and income are supported by the agglomeration of industry in a subset of countries. Economic development may not be a gradual process of convergence by all countries, but instead...

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus increases in the land area used by individual households. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.5%...