Essays on Urban and Environmental Economics

Urban and Environmental Economics are two branch of Economics that are more and more tightly interconnected and always should be. Trying to study how population is distributed across cities is a key point for several issues, either from a theoretical point of view or from a policy implementation point of view. Among the policies possibly affected by population distribution, policies dealing with climate change are one of the most affected, as people keep attributing a growing importance to the quality of their life, to the protection to natural risks and, then, policy makers have to care about how people are spread across cities. Viceversa, an effective climate policy should try to improve people’s life quality and to leave at least unaltered the population distribution, as it can cause, for example, job losses due to company relocation, which can alter in a substantial way the way in which population distributes in cities. In this thesis work, we aim to provide the international scientific community with new insights on some of the most relevant topics in these two branches: What is the actual distribution of population in cities of a country and what were the processes leading to it? Using different demographics variables or introducing some demographic characteristics (as age structure) could lead us to different results and give us different insights on the way in which people distribute across cities in a country? Could the greenhouse gas emissions behavior of a company be affected by the way in which the company is given the rights to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide? These are the main topics concerning the three chapters of which this thesis is constituted.