Introducció
This course is an introduction into urban economics. Cities are the centers of production and urban live. At the same time, cities are associated with social tensions, crime, pollution, and congestion. The first part of this course shows how scale economies and consumer externalities can explain the emergence of cities. These economic forces also help to understand the internal structure of cities and the corresponding spatial pattern of land rents and housing prices. The second part studies the role of the government and its impact on residential segregation. We will discuss the impact of zoning laws, rent control and the local provision of public goods on the location choice of households and firms. The highly stylized theoretical models developed in this course will be contrasted with empirical evidence from Europe and Spain.

Prerequisits
Introductory level microeconomics and statistics/econometrics.

Tema 0
Introduction.

Tema 1
Why do cities exist? - Production and consumption externalities.

Lectures
COSTA, Dora L.; KAHN, Matthew E. “Power Couples: Changes In The Locational Choice Of The College Educated, 1940-1990”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(4). 2000. Pàg. 1287-1315.
DURANTON, G.; PUGA, Diego. “Micro-foundations of urban agglomeration economies”. A: HENDERSON, V.; THISSE, J. F. (ed.). Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Vol. 4. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2004. Cap. 49.
GLAESER, E. L.; KOLKO, J.; SAIZ, A. “Consumer City”. Journal of Economic Geography, 1. 2001. Pàg. 27-50.
HANSON, G. H. “North American economic integration and industry location”. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 14(2). 1998. Pàg. 30-44.
HOLMES, T. J. “Localization of Industry and Vertical Disintegration”. Review of Economics and Statistics, 81(2). 1999. Pàg. 314-325.
JAFFE, A.; TRAJTENBERG, M.; HENDERSON, R. “Geographic Localization of Knowledge Spillovers as Evidenced by Patent Citations”. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108. 1993. Pàg. 577-598.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 2, 3 i 4.
ROSENTHAL, S.; STRANGE, W. “Evidence on the Nature and Sources of Agglomeration Economies”. A: HENDERSON, V.; THISSE, J. F. (ed.). Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Vol. 4. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2004. Cap. 49.

Tema 2
Urban land use and land rents: The monocentric city model.

Lectures
BRUECKNER, Jan K.; FANSLER, David A. “The Economics of Urban Sprawl: Theory and Evidence on the Spatial Sizes of Cities”. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 65(3). 1983. Pàg. 479-482.
FUJITA, Masahisa. Urban Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cap. 2 i 3.
FUJITA, M.; THISSE, J.-F. Economics of Agglomeration: Cities Industrial Location and Regional Growth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Sections 3.3.1.-3.3.2.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 6 including appendix.

Tema 3
Urban land use and land rents: Multicentric and edge cities.

Lectures
ANAS, Alex; ARNOTT, Richard; SMALL, Kenneth A. “Urban Spatial Structure”. Journal of Economic Literature, 36. 1998. Pàg. 1426-1464.
GLAESER, Edward L.; KAHN, Matt; CHU, Chenghuan. “Job Sprawl: Employment Location in U.S. Metropolitan Areas”. The Brookings Institution Survey Series. 2001.
LANG, Robert E. “Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business”. The Brookings Institution Survey Series. 2000.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 7.

Tema 4
City size and city growth.

Lectures
BLACK, Duncan; HENDERSON, Vernon. “Urban evolution in the USA”. Journal of Economic Geography, 3. 2003. Pàg. 343-272.
GABAIX, Xavier; IOANNIDES, Yannis M. “The Evolution of City Size Distributions”. A: HENDERSON, V.; THISSE, J. F. (ed.). Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. Vol. 4. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2004. Cap. 49.
GLAESER, E.; SCHEINKMAN, L.; SHLEIFER, A. “Economic growth in cross-section of cities”. Journal of Monetary Economics, 36. 1995. Pàg. 117-143.
IOANNIDES, Yannis M.; OVERMAN, Henry G. “Zipf’s Law for cities: an empirical examination”. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 33. 2003. Pàg. 127-137.
KRUGMAN, Paul. “Confronting the Mystery of Urban Hierarchy”. Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 10. 1996. Pàg. 399-418.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 4.
SOO, Kwok Tong. “Zipf’s Law for cities: a cross-country investigation”. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 35(3). 2005. Pàg. 239-263.

Tema 5
Land use control.

Lectures
AURA, Saku; DAVIDOFF, Thomas. “Supply constraints and housing prices”. CESifo Working Paper, 1738. 2006.
GLAESER, Edward; GYOURKO, Joseph; SAKS, Raven. “Why is Manhattan so expensive? Regulation and the rise in housing prices”. Journal of Law and Economics, 48. 2005. Pàg. 331-370.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 9.
PENDALL, Rolf; PUENTES, Robert; MARTIN, Jonathan. “From Traditional to Reformed: A Review of the Land Use Regulations in the Nation's 50 largest Metropolitan Areas”. The Brookings Institution. 2006. Report and regional profiles: http://www.brookings.edu/metro/pubs/20060810_landuse.htm.

Tema 6
Urban segregation.

Lectures
BRUECKNER, Jan K.; THISSE, Jacques-François; ZENOU, Yves. “Why is central Paris rich and downtown Detroit poor? An amenity-base theory”. European Economic Review, 43. 1999. Pàg. 91-107.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 8.
RAUCH, Jonathan. “Seeing around corners”. The Atlantic Monthly. Abril del 2002.
SCHMIDHEINY, Kurt. “Income Segregation and Local Progressive Taxation: Empirical Evidence from Switzerland”. Journal of Public Economics, 90. 2006. Pàg. 429-458.
TIEBOUT, Charles M. “A pure theory of local expenditures”. Journal of Political Economy, 64. 1956. Pàg. 416–424.

Tema 7
Public transport and traffic congestion.

Lectures
ARNOTT, R.; RAVE, T.; SCHÖB, R. Alleviating Urban Traffic Congestion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Cap. 1.
FUJITA, Masahisa. Urban Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cap. 7.4.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Cap. 11 i 12.

Bibliografia
FUJITA, Masahisa. Urban Economic Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
O'SULLIVAN, Arthur. Urban Economics. 6a. ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.

The reading list is preliminary. The specified chapters in O'Sullivan are compulsory while the original articles are recommended. The reading list will be augmented by current articles from the press. Lecture notes, slides and articles will be downloadable from the course homepage.