This study provides a comprehensive understanding of the Great Fire's effects on London's economic geography. Our analysis reveals both continuity and change. There was a swift postfire recovery accompanied by some shift in economic activity towards the City of Westminster by 1690, with markets...

Italy has been characterized, throughout its history as a unified country, by large regional differentials in the levels of income, industrialization and socio-economic development. This paper aims at testing the New Economic Geography hypothesis on the role of market access in explaining these...

Using the framework of Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg (2009), we present a model of spatial takeoff that is calibrated using spatially-disaggregated occupational data for England in c.1710. The model predicts changes in the spatial distribution of agricultural and manufacturing employment which match...

The Zollverein, the 1834 customs union between independent German states, removed all internal borders. This paper investigates its economic impact focussing on urban population growth in the state of Saxony. Implications from a economic geography model are tested with a data set on town...

This paper investigates the legacy of ancient colonialism (by the Phoenicians, Greeks and Etruscans) in shaping the modern-day population concentration and economic activity of the Mediterranean region. By combining historical data on ancient colonies and current data on population density and...