Essays in regional and complex urban economics

Cities are entities that are not “simple” but “complexly organized”. Theories about geographical structure of cities, land use patterns and cities evolution that explain how cities become spatially ordered are expanding to take in consideration this complexity. The conceptual foundation for the existence of central place hierarchies (i.e. the study of agglomeration economies in cities and trasportation and logistic costs) is now completed by the definition of emergent patterns that are not directly linked to the element of their economic processes but included in their “physic mechanisms” (i.e. the study of complex systems). This dissertation explores some of these aspects by performing empirical applications in the fields of regional and complex urban economics. The dissertation contributes to the long standing debate on the city size distribution. From the empirical standpoint, traditional studies on the distribution of cities typically rely a regularity known as Zipf’s Law. We first investigate some typical shortcomings related to the choiche of the right truncation point to discriminate between upper tail and body of the distribution (chapter 2). Secondly, we invesigate specific conditions leading to a weak form of Gibrat’s law in connection with the different typologies of rank-size distribution (Zipf’s law), by adopting parametric and non-parametric approaches (chapter 3) and, finally, we use both the laws in studying agglomeration forces whithin the European Union (chapter 4).