This is a short essay on open questions in urban economic theory.

Prepublication version of article that appeared as Zarembka, P (ed) Economic Theory of Capitalism and its Crises, Research in Political Economy 17, pp241-48. Stanford, CT: JAI Press. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.cws_home/621298/description#description This article formed part...

This article assesses the US discussion on the material roots of racism in which writers such as Malcolm X have been heavily criticised by ‘marxists’ for substituting race for class in the analysis of society. The article argues that such criticism departs from the classical Marxist...

We criticize the theories used to explain the size distribution of cities. They take an empirical fact and work backward to obtain assumptions on primitives. The induced theoretical assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity...

The tomahawk bifurcation is used by Fujita et al. (1999) in a model with two regions to explain the formation of a core-periphery urban pattern from an initial uniform distribution. Baldwin et al. (2003) show that the tomahawk bifurcation disappears when the two regions have an uneven population...

Endogenous business cycles can be generated using second-order linear equation systems. A generally accepted criticism of linear models is that only one value of the control parameter produces self-sustaining stable cycles. The problem therefore remains of accounting for the most salient...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in...

This paper, presented at the 1998 conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy in Lisbon, shows how variations in the value of money, and in the exchange rate between different moneys of account, lead to transfers of value on the one hand between national or...

This paper on inclusion was presented to the at the 2005 summer school of DEEEP (Development Education Exchange in Europe Project), Härnösand - Sweden, 5 - 12 June 2005. It addresses the significance of the concept of world civilisation. It assesses how meaning may be attached to the concept...

The modern literature on city formation and development, for example the New Economic Geography literature, has studied the agglomeration of agents in size or mass. We investigate agglomeration in sorting or by type of worker, that implies agglomeration in size when worker populations differ by...