Many development policies, such as placement of infrastructure or local economic development schemes, are "place-based." Such policies are generally intended to stimulate private sector investment and economic growth in the treated place, and as such they are difficult to appraise and evaluate....

We develop a dynamic spatial growth model to explore the role of trade and internal migration in the process of spatial development and aggregate growth. Growth is shaped by the best global and local ideas that contribute to the local stock of knowledge. Global ideas diffuse more to locations...

Does international trade affect the growth of cities, and vice versa? Assembling disaggregate data for four countries, we document a novel stylized fact: Export activity is disproportionately concentrated in larger cities - even more so than overall economic activity. We rationalize this fact by...

Between 1880 and 1920, the US agricultural employment share fell from 50% to 25%. However, despite aggregate demand shifting away from their sector of specialization, rural labor markets saw faster wage growth and industrialization than non-agricultural parts of the US. We propose a spatial...

We evaluate how anticipation and adaptation shape the aggregate and local costs of climate change. We develop a dynamic spatial model of the U.S. economy and its 3,143 counties that features costly forward-looking migration and capital investment decisions. Recent methodological advances that...

The impact of shocks in dynamic environments depends on how forward-looking agents anticipate the path of future fundamentals that shape their decisions. We incorporate flexible beliefs about future fundamentals in a general class of dynamic spatial models, allowing beliefs to be evolving,...

We use restricted-access, geocoded data on the near-universe of workers in 23 U.S. states in order to quantify the impact of wind energy development on local earnings and employment, by race, ethnicity, sex, and educational attainment. We find the largest relative impacts for workers without a...