This paper attempts to analyze the impact of knowledge and knowledge spillovers on regional total factor productivity (TFP) in Europe. Regional patent stocks are used as a proxy for knowledge, and TFP is measured in terms of a superlative index. We follow Fischer et. al (2008) by using a...

We provide empirical evidence of the dynamics of city size distribution for the whole of the twentieth century in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. We focus our analysis on the new cities that were created during the period of analysis. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is the...

This paper analyses the determinants of growth of American cities, understood as growth of the population or of per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all cities with more than 25,000 inhabitants in the year 2000 (1154 cities). The results show that while a...

The speed of income convergence in Europe remains one of the hot topics in regional economics. Recently Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) applied to spatial autoregressive models seems to have gained more popularity. BMA averages over some predetermined number of so called top models, ranked by the...

This paper reconsiders the evolution of the growth of American cities since 1790 in light of new theories of urban growth. Our null hypothesis for long-term growth is random growth. We obtain evidence supporting random growth against the alternative of mean reversion (convergence) in city sizes...

This paper analyses in detail the features offered by a function which is practically new to Urban Economics, the q-exponential, in describing city size distributions. We highlight two contributions. First, we propose a new and simple procedure for estimating their parameters. Second, and more...

Spatial Filter for spatial autoregressive models like the spatial Durbin Model have seen a great interest in the recent literature. Pace et al. (2011) show that the spatial filtering methods developed by Griffith (2000) have desireable estimation properties for some parameters associated with...

Classical spatial autoregressive models share the same weakness as the classical linear regression models, namely it is not possible to estimate non-linear relationships between the dependent and independent variables. In the case of classical linear regression a semi-parametric approach can be...

This paper presents a comparative assessment of two distinct urban growth modeling approaches. The first urban model uses a traditional Cellular Automata methodology, based on Markov transition chains to prospect probabilities of future urban change. Drawing forth from non-linear cell dynamics,...

In this paper an attempt is made to assess the hypothesis of re- gional club-convergence, using a spatial panel analysis combined with B-Splines. In this context, a 'convergence-club' is conceived as a group of regions that in the long-run move towards steady-state equilib- rium, approximated in...