 Romes without empires: Urban concentration, political competition, and economic developmentCem Karayalcin and Mehmet Ulubasoglu European Journal of Political Economy, 2020, vol. 63, issue C Abstract: Many developing economies are characterized by the dominance of a super metropolis. Taking historical Rome as the archetype of a city that centralizes political power to extract resources from the rest of the country, we present evidence that urban concentration, as proxied by the limited number of cities with national soccer league titles in a country, negatively affects long-run economic development. Utilizing cross-country data from 103 countries observed over half a century (1960–2009), we show that there is a strong and robust negative relationship between concentration of economic wealth and political power across urban nodes and long-run economic outcomes, including log per capita income and average years of schooling. The explanation that best seems to fit the evidence runs from centralization of economic power to lack of inter-elite political competition across space to inferior economic outcomes in the long-run. To establish causality we use identification through heteroskedasticity, which does not rely on standard exclusion restrictions. Date: 2020 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:63:y:2020:i:c:s0176268020300185 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2020.101870 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier |
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