We study how industry-level agglomeration economies affect government policy. Using administrative data on firm subsidies in economically lagging regions of Great Britain, we test two alternative hypotheses. Economic geography models imply that firms at an industry’s core can sustain higher...

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

We develop a multi-country Dixit-Stiglitz model to investigate the impacts of: (i) changes in the international distribution of consumers' expenditure; (ii) decreasing tariffs; and (iii) improvements in transportation infrastructure. We show that, in general, decreasing tariff barriers do not...

This Paper studies the positive aspects of destination vs. origin principles of commodity taxation as well as tax harmonization, with an emphasis on the international implications of these measures when firms are mobile. We investigate the tax incidence of these two principles on price levels...

We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine differential...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT), or the golden rule of local public finance, states that, in first-best economies, the fiscal surplus, defined as aggregate land rents minus aggregate losses from increasing returns to scale activities, is zero at optimal city sizes. We derive a general second-best...

We provide evidence for the effects of changes in transport costs, international trade exposure, and input-output linkages on the geographical concentration of Canadian manufacturing industries. Increasing transport costs, stronger import competition, and the spreading out of upstream suppliers...

We investigate the geographical distribution of economic activity and wages in a general equilibrium model with many asymmetric regions and costly trade. As shown by extensive simulations on random networks, local market size better explains a region’s industry share, whereas accessibility...

We extend the model by Krugman (1980) to a multi-country set-up and show that the ‘home-market effect’ highlighted with two countries does not readily extend to such a general setting. In particular, we prove that the most important result, namely the disproportionate causation from demand...

This paper analyses the effects of regional integration on the location of increasing-returns industry and the resulting pattern of trade. Theoretically, it is shown that regional integration may initially lead to a dispersion of industry inside the customs union. Below a certain threshold of...