According to Gibrat’s law for cities, population shocks have permanent effects on city size. I examine this implication by analysing the persistence of observed population shocks: German military casualties in WWI by municipality of birth. I find a strong negative effect of military casualties...

We study the link between subnational capital cities and urban development using a global data set of hundreds of first-order administrative and capital city reforms from 1987 until 2018. We show that gaining subnational capital status has a sizable effect on city growth in the medium run. We...

Globally, cities are the source of over 70 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Cities are also the engines of the global economy, concentrating more than half the world's population, and they are where the middle class is rapidly expanding. Indeed, by the year 2050, two-thirds of...

Institutional Fragmentation and Urbanisation in the EU Cities This article examines the relationship between institutional fragmentation and the spatial extent of cities in Europe's Functional Urban Areas. European Union planning regulations vary across member states, but in most cases, local...

This paper studies urban growth in Korean cities. First, I document that population growth patterns change over time and that the current population distribution supports random urban growth. I confirm two empirical laws-Zipf's law and Gibrat's law-both of which hold in the period of 1995-2015,...

Since 1980, economic growth in the U.S. has been fastest in its largest cities. We show that a group of skill- and information-intensive service industries are responsible for all of this new urban bias in recent growth. We then propose a simple explanation centered around the interaction of...

This paper introduces a new city-level panel dataset constructed using satellite nighttime light imagery and grid population data. The dataset contains over 1,500 cities covering 43 economies of Asia and the Pacific from 1992 to 2016. With the dataset, we perform a variety of analyses for Asia...

The morphology of today's cities is the result of historic urban developments and ongoing urban transformation resulting in complex urban spatial structures. While functionally as well as spatially, cities are structured into sub-units such as the city center, business districts, residential...

How does the structure of metropolitan areas a ect urbanization and welfare? Using the development of urban sub-centers in France in the 1970s, I study the short- and long-term e ects of urban structural changes. To retrieve within metropolitan area e ects, I exploit the fact that out of 11...

The fast and often chaotic urbanization of the developing world generates both economic opportunity and challenges, like contagious disease and congestion, because proximity increases both positive and negative externalities. In this paper, we review the expanding body of economic research on...

We develop an urban growth model where human capital spillovers foster entrepreneurship and learning in heterogenous cities. Incumbent residents limit city expansion through planning regulations so that commuting and housing costs do not outweigh productivity gains. The model builds on strong...

Seit der Öffnung des Eisernen Vorhangs war das ostdeutsche Städtesystem verschiedenen sich überlappenden Prozessen des institutionellen Wandels, wie dem rapiden Übergang von einer sozialistischen Plan- zur Marktwirtschaft, verschiedenen politischen und administrativen Reformen, sowie der...

Uncontrolled urban growth and haphazard land developments are one of the crucial problems in Addis Ababa and the surrounding Oromia special zone causing environmental degradation and rural-urban land base conflicts. This is mostly because of the rapidly increasing built-up area that conquered...

Interaction between space and time is well documented in the study of urban sprawl, where expansion of urban margins becomes the outcome of changing functionality of space within the given time frame. While urban sprawl becomes inevitable phenomena, the paper seeks to identify the role of...

In Bangladesh, cities are conventionally classified based on population size and revenue collection. This conventional city classification system neglects the spatial characteristics inherit in cities. Providing a more comprehensive city classification system is essential for the country’s...

As a country transitions from a lower order of development to a higher order of development, it undergoes a structural transformation. Accordingly, the spatial economy transforms from a system organized around smaller economic units distributed throughout the countryside, to one comprising...

Gender mainstreaming and gender budgeting aim to increase equality and equal opportunities between women and men. In contrast to the majority of evaluations of gender equality, which analyse legal, socio-political and distribution-relevant aspects, the aim of this research project is to estimate...