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The reasons for changes in ranking within urban systems are a matter of a wide and long debate. Some focus on a continuous and smooth ordering of cities by their size within the urban system, in the tradition of Zipf’s law. Others focus on discrete, discontinuous ordering, as cities take on functions at different levels, such as specialized market places or high-level education, in the tradition of Christaller. We enter the debate by empirically evaluating whether the same determinants explain continuous or discrete changes in urban ranks in the evolution of the Italian urban hierarchy over the years 1971 to 2011. We empirically show that small, continuous changes of cities’ ranks have different drivers than large, discontinuous leaps. The presence of high-level functions in a city predicts major leaps across discrete ranks. Results are robust to the use of an instrumental variable strategy based on a shift–share argument.

The 2016 referendum held in the UK about the possibility to quit EU membership as well as a wave of populistic movements sweeping all over European Countries seem to suggest that less integration could be an outcome for the European Union. This paper has the aim to measure the cost of a missed integration, by highlighting what GDP growth would be in case of a missed integration. It does so by building a scenario of missed integration and compares it with a reference scenario. Scenarios are based on the Macroeconomics, Social, Sectoral, Territorial (MASST) model that has recently been updated to its fourth generation, whereby regional economic relations are tested econometrically. The estimated cause–effect chains are then the basis to build new scenarios simulated under complex sets of internally coherent assumptions in a simulation stage. The reference scenario presented is not a simple extrapolation of past trends; the post-crisis period registered structural changes to be taken into account for the future. In the integration scenario, we assume further integration within the EU to take place through the following changes: (1) higher trade flows among EU countries (“production integration effect”); (2) higher decrease in non-tariffs barriers (“proximity effect to larger markets”); (3) higher trust within and among countries (“social effect”); (4) higher quality of government (“institutional effect”); (5) stronger cooperation networks among cities (“cooperation effect”); and (6) higher exports (“market integration effect”). Results show that a more integrated scenario leads to faster economic growth across all EU countries. Territorial disparities are also initially lower in the case of more integration, although this difference abates over time. Lastly, the gains from integration are not spatially even and some regions gain more than others.

With China's 2001 WTO accession, trade costs between the US and China fell sharply, but the transport costs of Chinese imports within the US remained sizable. We argue that domestic transport costs shield local labor markets from globalization. Using a shift-share design for industry-level Chinese imports across 42 ports of entry, we show that US job losses from competing imports occurred near the ports where they arrived. Once accounting for domestic transport costs, import competition affects coastal areas more than inland areas; shows larger impacts in housing markets and indirectly affected jobs; and explains voting, mortality and family formation