This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

This paper analyses the impact of unilateral climate policy on firms’ international location strategies in emission-intensive sectors, when countries differ in terms of market size. The cases of partial and total relocation via foreign direct investment are separately considered. A simple...

We present a theory of spatial development. A continuum of locations in a geographic area choose each period how much to innovate (if at all) in manufacturing and services. Locations can trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially across locations. The result is an...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the “cluster literature” contained in scientific journals from 1969 to 2007. Thanks to an original database we study the evolution of a stream of literature which focuses on a research object which is both a theoretical puzzle and an empirical...

We analyze the efficiency of urbanization patterns in a dynamic model of endogenous urban growth with two sectors of production. Production exhibits increasing returns to scale on aggregate. Urban environmental pollution, as a force that discourages agglomeration, is caused by domestic...

In recent years a growing body of literature has begun to consider the possible presence of path dependence in the development processes of countries. This phenomenon has always been recognized in regional and urban studies because the path of development almost naturally follows a...

The standard two-country model of international trade with monopolistic competition predicts a more-than-proportional relationship between a country’s share of world production of a good and its share of world demand for that same good, a result known as the “home market effect”. We first...

A spatial welfare framework for the analysis of the spatial dimensions of sustainability is developed. It incorporates agglomeration effects, interregional trade, negative environmental externalities and various land use categories. The model is used to compare rankings of spatial configurations...

The paper examines the formation of free trade agreements (FTAs) as a network formation game. We consider a general n-country model in which countries trade differentiated industrial commodities as well as a numeraire good. Countries may be different in the size of the industrial good industry...

This paper proposes a fixed-effect panel methodology that enables us to simultaneously take into account both TFP convergence and the traditional neoclassical-type of convergence. We analyse a sample of Italian regions between 1963 and 1993 and find strong evidence that both mechanisms were at...