Federico Trionfetti (AMSE faculty) received the award for best paper at the 27th annual INFER conference held in Rome from September 10 to 12, 2025.
I share this prize with my two coauthors, Rocco Rante - the greatest archaeologist on earth - and Priyam Verma, a very talented assistant professor at Ashoka university and formerly post-doc at amse. I also thank my department for providing research funds for R.A.
Some information about the article:
- Title: Geography and City Size: an exploration between Past and Present.
- Authors: Rocco Rante (archeologist), Federico Trionfetti and Priyam Verma (AMSE former post-doctoral fellow).
- Abstract: In this paper we estimate the contribution of geographical centrality to explain the size of cities. The paper is the result of interdisciplinary interactions between economics and archaeology. We use archeological data on the size of cities in the 9th Century for the region of Bukhara. With this data we estimate a spatial equilibrium model that explains almost perfectly the size of 9th century cities. We apply the estimated parameters to the United States for the 21st century. We find that geographical centrality explains 20% of the variation in population shares across U.S. commuting zones.
↪ More information on the conference at this link.
© INFER
From left to right in the photo, members of the executive board of the INFER: Claudiu Albulescu, Federico Trionfetti, Eleonora Cavallaro, Josep-Maria Arauzo Carod.
