Agglomeration and Demographic Change
This article investigates common consequences of demographic change and economic integration for the spatial location of economic activity. In doing so, it provides a unified framework that introduces an overlapping generation structure into a New Economic Geography model. Whether integration leads to agglomeration crucially hinges on the demographic properties of economies. While population aging strengthens concentration tendencies, population growth acts as a dispersion force. This is consistent with the stylized relationships between demography and urbanization found in the data and thus allows us to assess the possibility of agglomeration in various demographic scenarios.
Related Content
Density and Disasters: Economics of Urban Hazard Risk
Today, 37 million people live in cities in earthquake prone areas and 31 million in cities with a high probability of tropical cyclones. By 25 these numbers are likely to more than double, leading to a greater concentration of hazard risk in many of the world's cities. The authors discuss what se...


Spatial Discounting, Fourier, and Racetrack Economy: A Recipe for the Analysis of Spatial Agglomeration Models
We provide an analytical approach that facilitates understanding the bifurcation mechanism of a wide class of economic models involving spatial agglomeration of economic activities. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of the Turing (1952) approach that has been used to analyze the emerg...
Structural Change and Growth in a NEG Model
This paper presents a New Economic Geography model of structural change, agglomeration and growth. Assuming a non-homothetic preference structure, our results show that a progressive reduction of trade costs allows the economy to pass from a pre-industrialized to an industrialized stage and then,...
Do Governments Tax Agglomeration Rents?
Empirical evidence suggests that firms receive rents from locating in economic agglomerations and industry clusters. Using the German local business tax as a testing ground, we empirically investigate whether these agglomeration rents are taxable for local governments. The analysis exploits a ric...
Agglomeration elasticities and firm heterogeneity
This paper examines three key issues encountered when estimating the relationship between agglomeration and multi factor productivity (‘agglomeration elasticities’): the sorting of heterogeneous firms, the convexity of agglomeration effects, and the challenges of identifying the impact of per...


The Impacts of the Use of Mobile Telephone Technology on the Productivity of Micro- and Small Enterprises: An Exploratory Study into the Carpentry and Cabinet-Making Sector in Villa El Salvador (English)
As the mobile telephone becomes universally available in developing countries, the impacts of this technology have been documented in various publications. However, a review conducted by Donner and Escobari (2010) shows that there has been a lack of research into micro- and small enterprises (MSE...
Employment Protection, Flexibility and Firms' Strategic Location Decisions under Uncertainty
We construct a model in which oligopolistic firms decide between locating in a country where employment protection implies costly output adjustments and in one without employment protection. Using a two-period three-stage game with uncertainty, we demonstrate that location is influenced by both f...
Agglomeration economies in the neighbourhood? Evidence from German cities
In urban renewal policy, it has become a widespread goal to revitalise neighbourhood economies. The rationale for these measures derives, to a great extent, from the concept of regional economic clusters, and, not surprisingly, one of their key objectives is to activate local inter-firm cooperati...
Metropolitan Edison and cosmopolitan Pasteur? Agglomeration and interregional research network effects on European R&D productivity
This article examines empirically the relative influence of static and dynamic agglomeration effects on the one hand and research networking [measured by Framework Programme (FP) participation] on the other on regional R&D productivity in the European Union. We found that agglomeration is an ...
Co-agglomeration of knowledge-intensive business services and multinational enterprises
It has been argued that the relationship between knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the regional economy is advantageous for urban and regional dynamics. It is likely that KIBS aim to locate proximate to (internationally operating) MNEs becaus...