Paul Krugman has clarified the microeconomic underpinnings of both spatial economic agglomerations and regional imbalances at national and international levels. He has achieved this with a series of remarkably original papers and books that succeed in combining imperfect competition, increasing...

Economists explaining location choices of foreign affiliates usually focus on country-level determinants. Costs of production, the size of expected demand, proxies for agglomeration effects, and various policy-related incentives form the usual set of covariates. Two dimensions of those choices...

We investigate the hypothesis that firms prefer to locate ``where the markets are." We use a theoretical model of location choice under imperfect competition to formalise this concept. The model yields an equilibrium profit equation incorporating a term closely connected to the market potential...

This paper delves into the factors which determine the attractiveness of regions in Europe for migrants. Contrary to the literature on the US which has increasingly focused on the role of amenities, existing research in Europe tends to highlight the predominance of economic conditions as the...

Evaluating the impact of transport infrastructure meets a major challenge since rail lines are not randomly located. We use the natural experiment offered by the opening and progressive extension of the Regional Express Rail (RER) between 1970 and 2000 in the Paris metropolitan region, and in...

Using data on German and Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper analyses determinants of international location choice and the degree of substitutability of labour across locations. Countries with highly skilled labour forces strongly attract German but not necessarily Swedish...

This Paper addresses the question: why and where do immigrants cluster? We examine the relative importance and interaction of two alternative explanations of immigrant clustering: (1) network externalities and (2) herd behavior. We advance the theory by presenting a framework encompassing both...

We consider the impact of taxation when investors face a discrete choice between two or more mutually exclusive projects; in particular we consider the location choice of multinationals. Such choices depend on an effective average tax rate. We propose a precise measure of this rate, which is...

Productivity growth in the United States was considerably faster during 2000-03 than in the boom years of 1995-2000. This ebullient productivity performance raises numerous questions about its interpretation and its implications for the future, and these are stated here in the form of five...

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