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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

Investor confidence in reliable property rights and stable, market-oriented policies are a necessary condition for financial integration and the development of emerging stock markets. Announced market-oriented policies may be reversed, however, and are initially not fully credible. We argue that...

It is striking that by far the lion's share of empirical studies on the impact of outsourcing on firms considers industrialized countries. However, outsourcing by firms from emerging economies is far from negligible and growing. This paper investigates the link between outsourcing and innovation...

This paper constructs a new measure of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for bank lending to unhedged borrowers. This measure explicitly takes into account the indirect exchange rate risk that banks undertake when they lend to borrowers that will not be able to repay in the...