Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. This reflects the fact that these models rely heavily on specific...

This paper studies the social desirability of agglomeration and the efficiency arguments for policy intervention in a simple, analytically solvable ‘new economic geography’ model with two trade integrating regions. The location pattern emerging as market equilibrium is “bubbleshaped”,...

This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Spanish male earnings inequality for the period 1993-2000, by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory parts. According to the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel,...

The Spanish labour market disproportionately booms in expansions and bursts in recessions; meanwhile, its regions' relative position persists: those with the highest unemployment rates in 1996 were also in the worse position in 2012. To examine this twofold feature, we apply Blanchard and Katz's...