We develop a model of optimal pattern of economic development that is first rooted in physical capital accumulation and then in technical progress. We study an economy where capital accumulation and innovative activity take place within a two sector model. The first sector produces a...

We consider commuting in a congested urban area. While an efficient time-varying toll may eliminate queuing, a toll may not be politically feasible. We study the benefit of a substitute: a parking fee at the workplace. An optimal time-varying parking fee is charged at zero rate when there is...

We study the effect of a large set of department characteristics on individual publication records. We control for many individual time-varying characteristics, individual fixed-effects and reverse causality. Department characteristics have an explanatory power that can be as high as that of...

New Economic Geography models describe a cumulative process of spatial agglomeration: Firms tend to cluster in locations with good access to demand, and similarly, workers are drawn to regions where market potential is high because the price index is lower there. This paper provides an empirical...

Almost all models of the (New) Economic Geography have focused on interregional transportation costs to understand industrial location, considering regions as dots without intraregional transportation costs. We introduce a distinction between interregional and intraregional transportation costs....

Using a French exhaustive dataset, this article studies the determinants of regional disparities in mortality for patients admitted to hospitals for a heart attack. These disparities are large, with an 80% difference in the propensity to die within 15 days between extreme regions. They may...

China's export performance over the past fifteen years has been phenomenal. Is this performance going to last? Wages are rising rapidly but a population in excess of one billion represents a large reservoir of labor. Firms in export-intensive provinces may draw on this reservoir to increase...

This paper evaluates the role of economic geography in explaining regional wages in China. It investigates the extent to which market proximity can explain the evolution of wages, and through which channels. We construct a complete indicator of market access at the provincial level from data on...

Using a French exhaustive dataset, this article studies the determinants of regional disparities in mortality for patients admitted to hospitals for a heart attack. These disparities are large, with an 80% difference in the propensity to die within 15 days between extreme regions. They may...