This paper asks whether Germany was ever an economically integrated area. I explore the geography of trade costs in a new data set of about 40,000 observations on regional trade flows within and across the borders of Germany over the period 1885 - 1933. There are three key results. First, the...

This paper develops a simple model to analyze how a lack of political competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. We test the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. In these data, we find robust evidence that lack of political competition in a state is...

This paper uses micro data from the 1980, 1991 and 2000 population censuses to investigate the role of changes in the industry mix in accounting for the differential trends in the incidence of child work (ages 10-15) across Brazilian states. We find that exogenous compositional changes account...

Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial and total economic activity to peripheral regions, or do they reinforce the...

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the 'hard problem' of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

A rolling blackout in Colombia in the early 1990s led to a rise in unplanned births, according to research by Amar Shanghavi and colleagues. What's more, young women who became mothers after the blackout had worse outcomes in later life. The impact of power outages on fertility is an important...

After the fall of the Roman Empire, urban life in France became a shadow of its former self, but in Britain it completely disappeared. Guy Michaels and Ferdinand Rauch use these contrasting experiences as a natural experiment to explore the impact of history on economic geography - and what...

This paper answers the question whether extreme power rationing can induce changes in human fertility and thus, generate "mini baby booms". We study a period of extensive power rationing in Colombia that lasted for most of 1992 and see whether this has increased births in the subsequent year,...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavourable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...