We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

Higher ability workers benefit more from bigger cities while housing costs there are higher for everyone, and yet there is little sorting on ability. A possible explanation is that young individuals have an imperfect assessment of their ability, and, when they learn about it, early decisions...

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...

We exploit a unique panel of 75 metro areas (‘cities’) across the globe and employ a cityfixed effects model to identify the determinants of within-city changes in air pollution concentration between 2005 and 2011. Increasing car and population densities significantly reduce air pollution...

We present a modified open monocentric city model that assumes that land is available for conversion into new housing throughout the city. The model predicts that positive local income shocks (i) increase the city’s share of multi-family housing in new construction and (ii) lead to the...

A simple model of offshoring is used to integrate the complex gallery of results that exist in the theoretical offshoring/fragmentation literature. The paper depicts offshoring as ‘shadow migration’ and shows that this allows straightforward derivation of the general equilibrium effects on...

The Long-Term Consequences of Regional Specialization* What are the consequences of resource-based regional specialization, when it persists over a long period of time? While much of the literature argues that specialization is beneficial, recent work suggests it may be costly in the long run,...