The economic development and land use policies pursued in Southern California throughout most of the twentieth century encouraged rapid population growth and urbanization of land. The five counties of Southern California – Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura...

The “distance effect” measuring the elasticity of trade flows to distance has been to be rising since the early 1970s in a host of studies based on the gravity model, leading observers to call it the “distance puzzle”. We review the evidence and explanations. Using an extensive data set...