IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34029.html

The Death and Life of Great British Cities

Author

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

Abstract

Does industrial concentration shape the life and death of cities? Using newly constructed data that identify and track English and Welsh cities from the early nineteenth century to the present, we estimate the causal effects of industrial concentration and city size on urban dynamics. We show that greater industrial concentration reduces long-run productivity, conditional on industry-specific trends, consistent with the presence of cross-industry (Jacobs) externalities. We embed these dynamic city-level externalities in a quantitative multi-sector spatial model to evaluate their aggregate and distributional implications. Shutting down Jacobs externalities would reduce today’s North-South productivity divide by over 40%. The model also reveals a dynamic trade-off in the design of spatial clusters: patient policymakers favor diversification, whereas those prioritizing short-run gains favor concentration.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephan Heblich & Dávid Krisztián Nagy & Alex Trew & Yanos Zylberberg, 2025. "The Death and Life of Great British Cities," NBER Working Papers 34029, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34029
    Note: DEV ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34029.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Filippo Boeri & Olmo Silva, 2026. "Marshall at the times of Marshall," CEP Discussion Papers dp2174, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    2. Keiti Kondi & Willem Sas & Vincent Vandenberghe, 2025. "Where There was Smoke, There is Water: Canals as Indicator of Urban Income Inequality," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 2025008, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).

    More about this item

    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

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:34029. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.