We consider the literatures on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework to compare the two approaches. We then use this framework to study a number...

This paper considers the spatial distribution of economic activities in the European Union. It has three main aims. (i) To describe the data that is available in the EU and give some idea of the rich spatial data sets that are fast becoming available at the national level. (ii) To present...

When firms cluster in the same local labor market, they face a trade-off between the benefits of labor pooling (i.e., access to workers whose knowledge help reduce costs) and the costs of labor poaching (i.e., loss of some key workers to competition and the indirect effect of a higher wage bill...

Differences in promotion across genders are still prevalent in many occupations. Recent work based on experimental evidence indicates that women participate less in or exert lower effort during contests. We exploit the unique features of the promotion system for French academics to look at...

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...