IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/20420.html

The Death and Life of Great British Cities

Author

Listed:
  • Heblich, Stephan
  • Nagy, Dávid Krisztián
  • Trew, Alex
  • Zylberberg, Yanos

Abstract

Does industrial concentration shape the life and death of cities? We identify settlements from historical maps of England and Wales (1790–1820), isolate exogenous variation in their late 19th-century size and industrial concentration, and estimate the causal impact of size and concentration on later dynamics. Industrial concentration has a negative effect on long-run productivity — independent of industry trends and consistent with cross-industry Jacobs externalities. A spatial model quantifies the role of fundamentals, industry trends, and Jacobs externalities in shaping industry-city dynamics and isolates a new, dynamic trade-off in the design of place-based policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Heblich, Stephan & Nagy, Dávid Krisztián & Trew, Alex & Zylberberg, Yanos, 2025. "The Death and Life of Great British Cities," CEPR Discussion Papers 20420, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20420
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP20420
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • F63 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Economic Development
    • N93 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • R13 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General Equilibrium and Welfare Economic Analysis of Regional Economies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20420. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.