What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run, due to economic or political reasons. I examine this...

Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. This paper develops a model to explain firm labor demand and firm density across regions. Firms vary in their technology to combine imperfectly substitutable worker types, and locate across regions with distinct distributions...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our approach...

This paper assesses the potential of `workplace training' with reference to German Apprenticeship. When occupational matching is important, we derive conditions under which firms provide `optimal' training packages. Since the German system broadly meets these conditions, we evaluate the...

If personal computers (PCs) are used to enhance learning and information gathering across avariety of subjects, then a home computer might reasonably be considered an input in aneducational production function. Using data on British youths from the British HouseholdPanel Survey between 1991 and...

Using a model of wage determination developed by Stevens (2003) we offer an explanation of why tenure has a negative effect when entered in job satisfaction equations. If job satisfaction measures match quality, then the explanation follows from a model of the labour market in which workers...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investmentdecisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wageinequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. Thesedifferent trends are the...

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 estimates the effect of the shale oil and gas boom in the United States on local economic outcomes. The main source of exogenous variation to be explored is the location of previously unexplored shale deposits. These have become technologically recoverable through the use of hydraulic...

The size distribution of cities in many countries follows some broadly regular patterns. Any good theory of city size distributions should (i) be able to account for this regularity, but also (ii) rely on a plausible economic mechanism and (iii) be consistent with other fundamental features of...