I examine the causes and the consequences of differences in labor market outcomes across local labor markets within a country. The focus is on a long-run general equilibrium setting, where workers and firms are free to move across localities and local prices adjust to maintain the spatial...

We analyze the impact of globalization on individual gains from trade in a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition featuring product diversity, pro-competitive effects and income heterogeneity between and within countries. We show that, although trade reduces markups in both...

We use a North-South model with property right differences and resource dynamics to study the effects of trade on resource use and welfare. Autarky is likely to Pareto-dominate free trade in the long run when the environment is quite fragile, and the result is reversed when the environment is...

We examine the sales of French manufacturing firms in 113 destinations, including France itself. Several regularities stand out: (1) the number of French firms selling to a market, relative to French market share, increases systematically with market size; (2) sales distributions are very similar...

A large literature has documented a significant increase in the return to college over the past 30 years. This increase is typically measured using nominal wages. I show that from 1980 to 2000, college graduates have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan areas that are characterized by a...

We present in this paper a bench-mark model for the optimal speed of transition from a state-owned to a private market economy, based on the consumption-savings decision in a closed economy. This bench-mark model abstracts from rigidities or frictions to focus on the macroeconomic conditions for...

This paper explores the formation of cities through labour specialization, gains to trade, a fixed cost for the transportation network, imperfect competition between firms, and the commuting costs of consumers. The model uses a very general setting, allowing a multidimensional location space and...