Analysts of regional growth differences in the US tend to assume full spatial equilibrium (Glaeser et al, 1995). Flows of people thus indicate changes in the distribution of spatial welfare more effectively than differences in incomes. Research in Europe, however, shows that people tend to be...

We try to combine theory with empirical analysis to investigate the drivers of spatial growth processes, welfare and disparities in a context in which people are markedly immobile. Drawing on two of our recent papers (Cheshire and Magrini, 2006 and 2008), we review the evidence on the drivers of...

The paper investigates how the spatial evolution of core-based city regions affects the dynamics of income disparities across Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States between 1971 and 2010. Treating initially non-metropolitan counties as part of the functional economic system for the...

Do regions converge? This essay provides an overview of the key developments in the study of regional convergence, discussing the methodological issues that have arisen since the first attempts to analyse convergence and critically surveying the results that have been obtained for different...

Conditional distributions for the analysis of convergence are usually estimated using a standard kernel smoother but this is known to be biased. Hyndman et al. (1996) thus suggest a conditional density estimator with a mean function specified by a local polynomial smoother, i.e. one with better...