We document and then develop a model explaining and relating changes in firms'' organisation and in urban structure. Sharing of business services by headquarters and of sector-specific intermediates by production plants within a city reduces costs, while congestion increases with city size. A...

Spatial inequality in developing countries is due to the natural advantages of some regions relative to others and to the presence of agglomeration forces, leading to clustering of activity. This paper reviews and develops some simple models that capture these first and second nature economic...

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...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a ‘flat...