Adam Smith Business School

Professor Dávid Krisztián Nagy, Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI)

"The Death and Life of Great British Cities" (Joint Work with Stephan Heblich, Alex Trew, and Yanos Zylberberg)
Wednesday, 21 May 2025. 15:00-16:30
Room 141A, Adam Smith Business School Building

Abstract

Does industrial concentration shape the life and death of cities? To understand this, we identify settlements from historical maps of England and Wales over 1790–1820, isolate exogenous variation in the way they grew during the nineteenth century, and estimate the causal impact of their (heterogeneous) size and industrial concentration on later dynamics. We find a strong, negative effect of industrial concentration, irrespective of secular industry trends—consistent with externalities à la Jacobs. We then develop a spatial model to quantify the role of location fundamentals, exogenous industry trends, and city-specific endogenous externalities in explaining the distribution of economic activity across industries and cities. The strength of long-run Jacobs externalities, combined with the early, heterogeneous specialization of British cities, shapes much of ongoing spatial inequalities: they explain 40% of the present-day North/South productivity gap.

Bio

Dávid Krisztián Nagy is a Senior Researcher at Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREi), an Adjunct Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and an Affiliated Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). He has been a Peter B. Kenen Fellow at Princeton University, a Visiting Scholar at the Minneapolis Fed Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Princeton University in 2016, under the supervision of Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. His research focuses on international trade and economic geography. In his papers, he aims at developing quantitative structural tools and combining them with data to examine the drivers of the spatial distribution of economic activity. He has received the Robert E. Lucas Jr. Prize for his paper The geography of development (joint with Klaus Desmet and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg). He is a Co-Editor of the Regional Science and Urban Economics, a Research Fellow at CEPR, a Research Network Affiliate at CESifo, and a Fellow of the Hungarian Society of Economics.

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First published: 4 March 2025