Trade and Urban Seminars
The Death and Life of Great British Cities
Yanos Zylberberg (University of Bristol), joint with S. Heblich, D. Nagy and A. Trew
Wednesday 06 November 2024 12:30 - 14:00
SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH
About this event
This paper studies how industrial structure shapes the life and death of cities. We identify English and Welsh settlements from historical maps between 1790-1820, isolate exogenous variation in the nature of their rise during the nineteenth century, and estimate the causal impact of their (heterogeneous) size and industrial specialization on their later dynamics. We find a strong, negative effect of specialization, irrespective of secular industrial trends - consistent with dynamic externalities a la Jacobs. We then develop a spatial model to quantify the role of location fundamentals, exogenous industry trends, and city-specific endogenous externalities in explaining the distribution of economic activity across industries and cities. We show how the early specialization of British cities - fostered by openness to trade and transportation infrastructure - interacts with the previous dynamic forces to shape spatial inequalities: dynamic externalities a la Jacobs explain up to half of the current North/South productivity gap.
Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.
Directions
This event will take place in SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.
The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.Trade and Urban Seminars are part of the CEP's Trade programme and Urban programme.