We study how the city system is affected by the possibility for the members of the same cultural diaspora to interact across different cities. In so doing, we propose a simple two-city model with two mobile cultural groups. A localized externality fosters the productivity of individuals when...

U.S. county data for the last 20 or 30 years show that manufacturing employment has been deconcentrating. In contrast, the service sector exhibits concentration in counties with intermediate levels of employment. This paper presents a theory where local sectoral growth is driven by technological...

The Importance of innovation for the economic performance of industrialized countries has been largely stressed recently by the theoretical and empirical literature. Very few studies have carefully considered the determinants of European innovation, the productivity of its R&D and the existence...

Contemporary theories of entrepreneurship generally focus on the decision-making context of the individual. The recognition of opportunities and the decision to commercialize them is the focal concern. While the prevalent view in the entrepreneurship literature is that opportunities are...

The paper investigates regional labour markets dynamics in Europe and compares the results to those obtained for the United States. It analyses to what extent regional employment dynamics are common to all regions in Europe and to all states in the United States. It finds that a higher...

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labour-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

We propose a theory of skill mobility across cities. It predicts the well documented city size--wage premium: the wage distribution in large cities first-order stochastically dominates that in small cities. Yet, because this premium is reflected in higher house prices, this does not necessarily...

Productivity is high in cities partly because the urban environment acts as a self-selection mechanism. If workers have imperfect information about the quality of workers with whom they match and matches take place within cities, then high-ability workers will choose to live and work in...

This paper analyzes the relationship between crime and agglomeration where the land, labor, product, and crime markets are endogenously determined. We show that in bigger cities there is relatively more crime, a standard stylized fact of most cities in the world. We also show that, in the short...

Taking the early U.S. automobile industry as an example, we evaluate four competing hypotheses on regional industry agglomeration: intra-industry local externalities, inter-industry local externalities, employee spinouts, and location fixed-effects. Our findings suggest that inter-industry...