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A large body of empirical literature considers the productive advantages of cities, or "agglomeration economies." We present a meta‐analysis of this literature that draws on 6684 agglomeration elasticities from 294 studies spanning 54 countries and six decades. We find that elasticities are likely to lie in the range 0.015–0.039 and, like earlier reviews, that the controls enabled by detailed data are associated with smaller estimates. We make five main contributions: First, we find evidence that publication selection imparts a positive bias to the literature; second, we adopt novel methods that tend to yield more precise parameter estimates than conventional approaches; third, unlike earlier reviews, we do not find large differences between most countries nor an association with national income; fourth, we report new associations, for example between elasticities and the spatial scope of agglomeration, which may reflect underlying microeconomic channels; and fifth, we find evidence that elasticities for manufacturing sectors have fallen in recent decades, possibly due to lower freight costs and stricter environmental regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a unique set of micro-data covering almost one-third of the Dutch labor force, to estimate the heterogeneity of agglomeration externalities across education levels. This paper shows that there is substantial heterogeneity in the relationship between agglomeration and productivity of workers (proxied by their hourly wage) with different educational background. Apart from estimating the impact of the aggregate density of regional labor markets, we also estimate whether the composition of the local labor market in terms of education is related to the productivity of different types of workers. Using the presence of universities as an instrument, we estimate the effect of the supply of university graduates on wages, i.e. the social return to education. We find that agglomeration externalities are substantially higher for high- and medium skilled than for low-skilled employees. We find no positive effects from the presence of high-skilled on the productivity of low-skilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human migration is increasingly seen as a promising climate change adaptation and flood risk reduction strategy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how spatial differences in flood risk, due to differences in flood protection, reduce the mobility of vulnerable households through a credit constraint mechanism. Using an equilibrium model with two households types and endogenous sorting, we show how spatial differences in flood protection lead to clustering of vulnerable households in a risky region, in a real-world setting of common United States (US) flood zones. We find clustering effects of some size for flood zones with return periods of less than 30 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]