This paper investigates the impacts of progressive trade openness, technological externalities, and heterogeneity of individuals on the formation of entrepreneurship in a two-country occupation choice model. We show that trade opening gives rise to a non-monotonic process of international...

This paper describes the spread of industry from country to country as a region grows. All industrial sectors are initially agglomerated in one country, tied together by input-output links between firms. Growth expands industry more than other sectors, bidding up wages in the country in which...

This paper analyses a model of economic development in which international inequalities in the location of industry and income are supported by the agglomeration of industry in a subset of countries. Economic development may not be a gradual process of convergence by all countries, but instead...

We study the relationship between geography and growth. To do so, we first develop a dynamic spatial growth theory with realistic geography. We characterize the model and its balanced growth path and propose a methodology to analyze equilibria with different levels of migration frictions. We...

This paper explores the interactions between external trade and regional disparities in the Italian economy since unification. It argues that the advantage of the North was initially based on natural advantage (in particular the endowment of water, intensive in silk production). From 1880...

Theory is divided on whether falling transport costs lead to more or less spatial concentration of economic activity. Using US county-level data we find that aggregate employment became more concentrated between 1972-92. This aggregate picture hides important differences between sectors though....

This paper analyzes empirically the effect of spatial agglomeration of activities on the productivity of firms using French individual firm data from 1996 to 2004. This allows us to control for endogeneity biases that the estimation of agglomeration economies typically encounters. French firms...

This paper presents a dynamic, two-region general equilibrium model in which inter-regional production and trade patterns are endogenously determined. Localized growth stems from geographical concentration of an industrial sector exhibiting permanent productivity increases. Geographical...

Recent theoretical work on economic geography emphasizes the interplay of transport costs and plant-level increasing returns. In these models, the spatial distribution of demand is a key determinant of economic outcomes. In one strand, it is argued that higher demand gives rise to a more than...

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...