History and urban economics

War and city size: The asymmetric effects of the Spanish Civil War

“…The distribution of populations across space, especially urban populations, is at the heart of research in economics, human geography and other social sciences. As explained by Hanlon & Heblich, 2022) in their "History and urban economics" review, in recent times, some researchers have turned to the use of historical data to analyze the causes of the existence or growth of cities (see also Nagy, 2022). A major strand of this literature considers whether shocks have transitory or more permanent effects on city size.…”

“…Recently, there has been growing interest in the effect of different types of shocks on city populations, such as those produced by biological and climatological disasters, economic crises, and high immigration flows (e.g., Bakker et al, 2020; Baltagi et al, 2023; Bosker et al, 2008a; Dijkstra et al, 2015; Glaeser, 2011; Sastry & Gregory, 2014; Xu & Wang, 2019). However, few studies have attempted to analyze the impact of war on population, especially on urban structure (see Hanlon & Heblich, 2022). The key question is to what extent war shocks have transitory or more permanent effects on the distribution of urban populations.…”

“…Since Davis and Weinstein (2002), the standard empirical specification, with minor modifications, has consisted of a crosssectional regression in which the variation of a city's population between two selected, postwar, points in time is regressed on the variation of a city's population during the war years. However, this represents a "static" approach in which estimates may also be sensitive to the choice of the postwar period considered in the dependent variable (Chang et al, 2015;Head & Mayer, 2004). Hanlon's (2017) proposal is more dynamic, since decennial (census) shock-specific time effects interact with the variable of interest.…”

Regulatory Barriers to Climate Action: Evidence from Conservation Areas in England

“…The work is naturally related to the growing literature in urban economics that makes use of exceptionally granular spatial data to understand the emergence of the modern city using historical and contemporaneous data (see Hanlon and Heblich, 2022 for a recent review and Henderson and Becker, 2000 for early work). This research is particularly important as developing countries are experiencing rapid rates of urban transformation (see for example Henderson et al, 2021) and climate change is an important driver of this (Henderson et al, 2017).…”

The Role of Historic Amenities in Shaping Cities

“…Interestingly, the effects are stronger the greater the quantity and the quality of historic amenities, Our paper contributes to different strands of the literature. First, it contributes to the literature that uses insights from history to understand key aspects of urban economics (see Hanlon and Heblich (2022) for an exhaustive review and Lin and Rauch (2022) for an interesting approach on under which conditions history matters). In particular, we add new evidence to the research that uses historic data on buildings to analyze the distribution of the population across space.…”