A wide urban-rural disparity is observed in employment growth in the United States. For example, employment growth averaged 2.1 percent in urban counties during 1998-2007, compared with just 1 percent in rural counties. In this study, we examine the sources of U.S. employment growth using the...

We analyze the impact of EU structural and cohesion funds on economic growth of European regions, using 2SLS to tackle the potential problem of endogeneity, and estimating a spatial model to account for inter-regional spillovers. We use the presence of environmentally protected areas (under the...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

Following the historic 2015 Paris Agreement aiming to limit global temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100, 165 Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, representing 192 countries, have been submitted. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) detail each...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War era Space Race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending. Our results demonstrate that public R&D...