History versus Expectations in Economic Geography Reconsidered

This paper studies global stability of spatial configurations in a dynamic two-region model with quadratic adjustment costs where rational migrants make migration decisions so as to maximize their discounted future utilities. A global analysis is conducted to show that, except for knife-edge cases with symmetric regions, there exists a unique spatial configuration that is absorbing and globally accessible whenever the degree of friction is sufficiently small, and such a configuration is characterized as the unique maximizer of the potential function of the underlying static model.