Empirical Essays on Spatial Inequality

Abstract

Spatial inequality is increasingly rising across countries within both the Global North and South. There has been a long-standing debate in the academic community regarding the relevance and significance of spatial inequality. Early perspectives maintained that spatial inequality is a price to pay for aggregate efficiency, or suggested that information, communication, and transportation technologies would, in the long run, contribute to a spread of economic activity across space. On the contrary, recent studies have started to examine the consequences of spatial inequality and argue that spatial inequality carries significant social, political, and economic implications, while also suggesting that modern technologies alone generally fall short of capacity to redress spatial inequality. Building on the recent research on spatial inequality cutting across Economic Geography, Urban and Regional Economics, Political Science, and Public Policy, this thesis empirically investigates a set of key topics on the causes and consequences of spatial inequality. Chapter 2 examines the causes of the rural-urban gap in sociopolitical attitudes that has been opening up across many advanced economies. It does so by causally estimating the impact of exposure to urban density during the “impressionable years” on later-in-life individual outlooks. Chapter 3 leverages large-scale data to construct novel measures on subnational, intra-regional spatial inequality and its link with political protests across around 90 Global South countries. Spatial inequality has been described as a trigger for the rise of political discontent, which has in turn led to macroeconomic shocks such as the Brexit vote. Chapter 4 hence studies the impact of Brexit on household economic expectations and regional aggregate consumption, to better understand the long-term impacts brought about by the recent “geographies of discontent”. Chapter 5 studies the geography of remote work uptake during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore whether the “work-from-home revolution” may contribute to reducing - or increasing - current trends of territorial divergence.