We examine the effects of the legal reform passed in 2012 in Spain to protect mortgage debtors. Under the new regime, it is difficult for low-income debtors who meet certain requirements to be evicted. In the case of default, the bank is forced to offer the debtor a restructuring of the debt, or...

If the population of a given country evolves according to Gibrat'�s Law, its growth rate will be independent of its initial size. This short paper further investigates this empirical regularity by the application of a suitable panel unit root test and non-parametric methods. The evidence...

A re-assessment of Gibrat's Law in the context of country size is carried out in this paper. In addition, how similarly population is distributed in cities and countries is analyzed from a temporal perspective. Although evidence of Gibrat's Law is found, it is weaker than that previously...

The economic literature examining changes in divorce rates is not conclusive since legal reforms have been found to have permanent, transitory or no effect on divorce rates. This paper studies differences in divorce rates among 16 European countries from 1930 to 2006, by exploiting time-series...

This paper analyses the determinants of growth of American cities, understood as growth of the population or per capita income, from 1990 to 2000. This empirical analysis uses data from all cities with no size restriction (our sample contains data for 21,655 cities). The results show that while...

The aim of this paper is to analyse, through a theoretical model, the effects that the trade integration of two countries may have on industrial location, growth and welfare. The conclusions reached finally depend both on whether the import or the export costs are affected by the trade policies...

This paper analyses the evolution of city size distribution in the United States throughout the twentieth century. In particular, it tests the validity of two empirical regularities studied in urban economics: Zipf’s law, which postulates that the product between rank and size of a population...

In this paper we present a model integrating characteristics of the New Economic Geography, the theory of endogenous growth and the economy of natural resources. This theoretical framework enables us to study explicitly the effect of “first nature causes” in the concentration of economic...

This paper analyses the evolution of city size distribution in the United States throughout the twentieth century. It tests the validity of two empirical regularities studied in urban economics: Zipf’s law (the rank-size rule), and Gibrat’s law or the law of proportionate growth. The main...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the size distribution of the stock of immigrants in the period 1960–2000. In particular, we are interested in testing the validity of two empirical regularities: Zipf’s law, which postulates that the product between the rank and size of a population is...