This paper presents evidence that high speed rail systems, by bringing economic agents closer together, sustainably promote economic activity within regions that enjoy an increase in accessibility. Our results on the one hand confirm expectations that have led to huge public investments into high speed rail all over the world. On the other hand, they confirm theoretical predictions arising from a consolidate body of (New) Economic Geography literature taking a positive, man-made and reproducible shock as a case in point. We argue that the economic geography framework can help to derive ex-ante predictions on the economic impact of transport projects. The subject case is the German high speed rail track connecting Cologne and Frankfurt, which, as we argue, provides exogenous variation in access to regions due to the construction of intermediate stations in the towns of Limburg and Montabaur.

We find a positive and strong correlation between financial development and subsequent city growth in the Northeastern United States between 1790 and 1870. The correlation is robust to controls for geographical characteristics of the city, the percentage of population working in different sectors, and its initial population. Our estimates suggest that the presence of a bank at a given location increases its subsequent growth by one to two percentage points per year. Because urban growth was correlated with economic development in the nineteenth-century US, we believe our results provide further support for the finance-growth nexus.

This paper considers the spatial structure of a city subject to final demand and vertical linkages. Individuals consume differentiated goods (or services) and firms purchase differentiated inputs (or services) in product (or service) markets where forms compete under monopolistic competition. Workers rent their residential lots in an urban land market and contribute to the production of differentiated goods and inputs. We show that firms and workers co-agglomerate and endogenously form a city. We characterize and discuss the spatial distribution of firms and consumers in such cities on one- and two- dimensional spaces (linear city and planar city). We show that final demand and vertical linkages raise the urban density and reduce the city spread. We finally show that a city is too much dispersed compared to the social optimum.

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group (via increasing property prices) but hurt the latter (via increasing development costs). More desirable locations are more developed and, as a consequence of political economy forces, more regulated. Using OLS as well as an IV approach that directly follows from our model we find strong and robust support for our predictions at the US metro area level. We conclude from our analysis that land use regulations are suboptimal.

By raising commuting costs, an increase in gasoline prices should reduce the demand for housing in areas far from employment centers relative to locations closer to jobs. Using annual panel data on a large number of ZIP codes and municipalities from 1981 to 2008, we find that a 10 percent increase in gas prices leads to a 10 percent decrease in construction in locations with a long average commute relative to other locations, but to no significant change in house prices. Thus, the supply response may prevent the change in housing demand from capitalizing in house prices.

In 2000, wages of full time full year workers were more than 30 percent higher in metropolitan areas of over 1.5 million people than rural areas. The monotonic relationship between wages and city size is robust to controls for age, schooling and labor market experience. In this paper, we decompose the city size wage gap into various components. We propose an on-the-job search model that incorporates latent ability, search frictions, firm-worker match quality, human capital accumulation and endogenous migration between large, medium and small cities. Counterfactual simulations of the model indicate that variation in returns to experience and differences in wage intercepts across location type are the most important mechanisms contributing to the overall city size wage premium. Steeper returns to experience in larger cities is more important for college graduates while differences in wage intercepts is more important for high school graduates. Sorting on unobserved ability within education group and differences in labor market search frictions and distributions of firm-worker match quality contribute little or slightly negatively to observed city size wage premia in both samples.