Cities in Developing Countries

Catalog description

In this course we will explore topics in urban economics applied to developing country settings. We will discuss the specificities of developing country urbanization, emphasizing institutional constraints, market imperfections, and key policy questions. We will also discuss methodological challenges arising when conducting research on developing country cities, such as data limitations, and the creative ways in which recent papers have addressed them. The goal is to give students an overview of the important questions in the field and of the cutting-edge tools employed in this growing literature. Some of the topics we will explore include: migration, slums, infrastructure and transit, land use, urban form, place-based policies, local public finance, and quantitative urban models.