In this paper we show that the recent model by Duranton (AER, 2007) performs remarkably well in replicating the city size distribution of West Germany, much better than the simple rank-size rule known as Zipf's law. The main mechanism of this theoretical framework is the churning of industries...

Die Größenstruktur der deutschen Städte folgt so wie in vielen anderen Ländern einer strengen Gesetzmäßigkeit: dem Zipfschen Gesetz. Es gibt starke Hinweise, dass dieses Zipfsche Gesetz nicht nur auf nationaler Ebene gilt, sondern auch auf der Ebene von Bundesländern und teilweise sogar...

Recent thinking about the economics of climate change has concerned the uncertainty about the upper bound of both climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases and the damages that might occur at high temperatures. This argument suggests that the appropriate probability distributions for these factors...

Many structural econometric models include latent variables on whose probability distributions one may wish to place minimal restrictions. Leading examples in panel data models are individual-specific variables sometimes treated as "fixed effects" and, in dynamic models, initial conditions. This...

Redistributive grants schemes, such as fiscal equalization, are a common characteristic of local public finance in several countries. However, large and small jurisdictions are treated differently by the respective fiscal equalization schemes that often tend to favour larger jurisdictions. This...

The paper proposes an econometric approach for quantifying jointly the geographical scope of commuting as well as the various forms of agglomeration economies originating from metropolitan centers. Adopting an urban economics perspective, and using land prices to measure their aggregate effects,...

This paper presents an economic geography model to show the spatial effects of economic integration. While other authors mainly focused on the explanation of cumulative causation effects that lead to complete concentration or absolutely equal dispersion of industries, this paper explains why...