Using a novel data set for 207 European regions from 22 different countries, we analyse the relevance of urbanisation for the short-term resilience to a major shock. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and analyse how the European NUTS 2 regions differ in their short-run resilience in the aftermath to the crisis in terms of unemploym…

We study the resilience of cities by analysing the relative capacity to sustain their production of technological knowledge in the face of adverse events. Using patent applications in 366 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the USA from 1975 to 2002, we analyse the vulnerability and response of cities to technological crises, defined as periods of sustained negative growth in patenting activity. …

The uneven revitalisation of some North American manufacturing industries calls attention to the challenges and opportunities facing historical industry core regions. Yet policy prescriptions routinely overlook industry- and place-specific factors that enable or restrict the viability of manufacturing over time. We re-engage Markusen�s profit-cycle model of industrial evolution and dispers…

A digital skin of the city is coming into being. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. The urban world is becoming a platform for generating data on the workings of human society, human interactions with the physical environment and manifold economic, political and social processes. The advent of the digital skin opens up many questions for urban theory and research, …

This issue brings together a set of articles that examine current debates around the goals, ethics, potential and limitations of a concept that has become a metaphor for urban modernity. We also include an unusual addition, a short intervention that surfaces some of the controversial issues related to smart cities, as a conception and as a practical undertaking.

The study produces new data on the long-term development of vegetable foodstuff output and average labor productivity in Saxon agriculture c. 1660�1850. This territory saw an early development of a large, but spatially dispersed industrial sector and an agrarian reform in 1832. We establish, first, that food demand from the labor force of the non-agricultural sectors promoted agricultural …

The development of living standards in Java has long been a subject of scholarly interest. Anumberof scholars have suggested that between 1600 and 1900 Southeast Asian living standards declined significantly. The present article contributes to these issues by calculating long-term real wages for Java between 1680 and 1914, following Allen�s subsistence basket methodology. New data on wages…

We create new datasets on capital flows and bank balance sheets to document how the Spanish crisis of the mid-1860s fits the main characteristics of a twin crisis. Next,we describe the particular banking system of Spain, characterized by the coexistence of the Bank of Spain with multiple local banks of issue and a number of joint-stock banks (sociedades de cre�dito).We analyze the microeco…

Self-defeating austerity entails �perverse effects� of fiscal consolidation such that fiscal indicators deteriorate. Inter alia, this depends on the size of the fiscal multiplier as Keynes (1933. The Means to Prosperity. London: Macmillan) underlined. We find that the government expenditure multiplier was less than 1 in 1930s� Britain. Austerity was not self-defeating in the long…

This study investigates theimpact of joint-stock bank son the rationalization of the British interwar steel industry. A new panel data set of steel firm characteristics covering 1920�1938 is used to document rationalization and bank involvement, including interlocking directorships, with both found to bemore extensive than previously thought. A set of all potential amalgamation pairs is cr…