This paper sets out a simple spatial model of energy exploitation to ask how the location and productivity of energy resources affects the distribution of economic activity across geographic space. By combining elements from energy economics and economic geography we link the productivity of...

The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until recently, the theoretical literature on economic geography had focused on stylized...

We study the urban structure of the City of Detroit. Following several decades of decline, the city's current urban structure is clearly not optimal for its size, with a business district immediately surrounded by a ring of largely vacant neighborhoods. We propose a model with residential...

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...

This paper develops a multi-stage general-equilibrium model of global value chains (GVCs) and studies the specialization of countries within GVCs in a world with barriers to international trade. With costly trade, the optimal location of production of a given stage in a GVC is not only a...

We show that agglomeration forces can reverse standard international-tax-competition results. Closer integration may result first in a race to the top' and then a race to the bottom, a result that is consistent with recent empirical work showing that the tax gap between rich and poor nations...

In Beijing, the metropolitan government has made enormous place based investments to increase green space and to improve public transit. We examine the gentrification consequences of such public investments. Using unique geocoded real estate and restaurant data, we document that the construction...