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Sum m ary. This is the ® rst report of pattern s of population change during the 1980s in the m ajor urban region s of the Europ ean U nion (of 12), using the resu lts of the 1990 census rou nd (or registra tion data where no census was taken). T here is evid ence of a substan tial break up of the previous regu lar pattern of decen tralisat ion, which had been spread ing from north ern to southern Europ ean cities and from the largest to the m edium -sized cities. During the 1980s there w as a sign i® can t degree of recen tralisat ion in many north ern E urop ean cities, with nearly half of all core cities gain ing population. The evid ence presen ted here is con sisten t w ith argu m ents advan ced in an earlier paper w hich suggested that such a change of pattern s should be anticip ated . There does not appear to be a com plete reversa l of previou s pattern s, however. Som e urban region s con tinue to decen tralise and declin e; others are declin ing but exp erien cing relative recen tralisat ion. T he pattern is that there is now a greater variatio n in pattern s. Cities which are exp erien cing the m ost relative recen tralisat ion show that they are not a ran dom grou p. T hey have characteri stics consistent with the cau sal analysis w hich is presen ted. The plausibility of gen eral, rather than particula ristic exp lanation s, is m ade greater by the very sim ilar change of tren ds recen tly reported for US cities.

This paper explores the sources and impact of variations of a given school quality at either primary or secondary level as capitalised into the price of houses. The results provide new evidence on the complex and subtle ways in which housing markets capitalise the value of local public goods such as school quality and suggest that this is highly nonlinear. We expect variation in the capitalised price according to the elasticity of supply of 'school quality' in the local market, the certainty with which that quality can be expected to be maintained and the suitability of the dwelling to accommodate children.Concern over the quality of local schools, and over the variation in this quality, has drawn the attention of parents, policy makers and scholars. For many households, there is a single path to access quality education: identify an acceptable quality state-supported school and purchase a house in the area served by that school. Households lacking the means to move to such areas will face reduced educational opportunities, and that fact continues to generate concern.Interest in these issues has a long history. For economists, it goes back at least to Tiebout (1956) and Oates (1969). The questions they addressed were how do we determine the demand for and supply of local public goods, including education, and how do we pay for such goods. It was Oates who first drew attention to the ways in which the value of local public goods were capitalised in urban land markets. From this many implications flow including the role that land markets play in articulating social segregation (Brueckner et al., 1999) and the interaction this will have with the distribution of incomes (Cheshire et al., 2000) and the supply characteristics of local public goods and amenities. In this paper we explore the extent of capitalisation of educational quality into house prices, and examine how this might be affected by factors conditioning the supply of educational quality of a given expected standard as well as by local policies, such as land use planning.At least four methodological approaches can be distinguished in the literature concerned with estimating the value placed on school quality. The longest established is a straightforward hedonic approach of which two of the others are variants. The hedonic approach has some 80 years of evolutionary development behind it since agricultural economists first implemented it as a purely empirical technique to help identify the characteristics of vegetables commanding the highest price. Since Rosen's (1974) contribution it has become one of the * We would like to thank the Leverhulme Foundation and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy for supporting the work underlying this paper. We would also like to thank numerous colleagues, the referees and the Editor of this Journal for valuable comments and insights. The usual disclaimer applies with respect to remaining errors.

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The traditional empirical approaches to the analysis of economic growth,cross-section and panel data regressions are substantially uninformative withrespect to the issue of convergence. Whether national or regional economies appear to converge in terms of per capita income or productivity levels (the so-called &bgr;-convergence) critically depends on the way in which the empirical model is specified. Traditional specifications witness a disproportionate presence of proxies for forces leading towards divergence among the conditioning variables. It is therefore hardly surprising that these analyses find a positive and statistically significant value for the estimate of the speed of convergence. Copyright 2000 Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky.

This paper provides estimates of the structure of demand for individual housing and neighbourhood characteristics and for land in two British cities. We estimate a hedonic price function, and from this obtain the implicit prices of house attributes. These prices are used to estimate a demand system for each city. These perform well, and enable us to calculate price and income elasticities for each of the non‐dichotomous characteristics and for land. To counteract criticisms of demand estimates derived within the hedonic framework a method is developed for selecting an appropriate set of instrumental variables. Estimates derived from this method, however, differ only slightly from those obtained using the conventional techniques. Several features of these estimates provide insights into the unusual characteristics of the British housing market, the effects of constraints imposed by land use planning, and the effects of changing income distribution on the structure of demand.