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...

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 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...

This chapter surveys recent developments in agglomeration theory within a unifying framework. We highlight how locational fundamentals, agglomeration economies, the spatial sorting of heterogeneous agents, and selection effects affect the size, productivity, composition, and inequality of...

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...

This Paper considers the spatial distribution of economic activities in the European Union. It has three main aims: (i) to describe the data that is available in the EU and give some idea of the rich spatial data sets that are fast becoming available at the national level; (ii) to present...

This Paper examines how the geography of UK international trade has changed since the UK’s accession to the European Economic Community using a newly constructed dataset that gives a detailed breakdown of the UK’s imports and exports by both port of entry and exit, and commodity. Our results...

The aim of this paper is to qualify the claim that regulating a competitive transport sector is always detrimental to consumers. We show indeed that, although transport deregulation is beneficial to consumers as long as the location of economic activity is fixed, this is no longer true when, in...

We use a point-pattern methodology to explore the detailed location patterns of UK manufacturing industries. In particular, we consider the location of entrants and exiters vs. continuing establishments, domestic- vs. foreign-owned, large vs. small, and affiliated vs. independent. We also...

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more productive via various agglomeration economies. This paper provides a...