We here consider how Chinese firms adjust to higher minimum wages and how these affect aggregate productivity, exploiting the 2004 minimum-wage reform in China. We find that higher city-level minimum wages reduced the survival probability of firms which were the most exposed to the reform. For...

The authors analyze the optimal replacement of assets under continuous and discontinuous technological change. They investigate the variable lifetime of assets in an infinite-horizon replacement problem. Due to deterioration, the maintenance cost increases when the asset becomes older. Because...

Carbon leakage in this pape ris the phenomenon whereby Electricity Intensive Industries subject to harsh environmental standards move their activity or part of it to more environmentally lenient regions. Carbon leakage has been mentioned as a possible outcome of the EU Emission Trading Scheme....

We show that how technological innovations and migration costs interact to shape the space-economy. Regardless of the level of transport costs, rising labor productivity fosters the agglomeration of activities, whereas falling transport costs do not affect the location of activities. When labor...

This paper considers whether countries might mutually agree a policy of open borders, allowing free movement of workers across countries. For the countries to agree, the short run costs must outweighed by the long term benefits that result from better labor market flexibility and income...

We propose a model where imperfect matching between firms and workers on local labor markets leads to incentives for spatial agglomeration. We show that the occurrence of spatial agglomeration depends on initial size differences in terms of both number of workers and firms. Allowing for dynamics...

Using a matched employer-employee database for Italy we look at the spatial distribution of wages across provinces. This rich database allows us to contribute at opening the black box of agglomeration economies exploiting the micro dimension of the interaction among economic agents, both...

Models with endogenous growth due to production externalities imply that per capita output is positively affected by the size of the labor force (which we interpret as the stock of human capital). In this framework we investigate the effects of labor migration between two countries in the...

First, we briefly discuss the very idea of tradable quotas, looking at a set of cases in which it has been proposed (but not implemented) outside the realm of pollution control and natural resources management. Next we study a proposal of tradable procreation quotas. We generalize Boulding’s...