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...

This paper aims at assessing the role of market linkages in shaping the spatial distribution of earnings. Using a space-time panel data on Italian provinces, I structurally estimate a NEG model in order to both test the coherence of theory with data, as well as to give a measure of the extent of...

Few studies conceive of land as a productive factor but British land use policies may lower total factor productivity (TFP) in the retailing industry by (i) restricting the total availability of land for retail, thereby increasing space costs (ii) directly limiting store size and (iii)...

We develop non-nested tests in a general spatial, spatio-temporal or panel data context. The spatial aspect can be interpreted quite generally, in either a geographical sense, or employing notions of economic distance, or when parametric modelling arises in part from a common factor or other...

We provide a general class of tests for correlation in time series, spatial, spatiotemporal and cross-sectional data. We motivate our focus by reviewing how computational and theoretical difficulties of point estimation mount as one moves from regularly-spaced time series data, through forms of...

This paper uses a difference-in-difference estimator to test whether the introduction of patient choice and hospital competition in the English NHS in January 2006 has prompted hospitals to become more efficient. Efficiency was measured using hospitals’ average length of stay (LOS) for...

The convergence hypothesis has generated a huge empirical literature: this paper critically reviews some of the earlier key ndings, claries their implications, and relates them to more recent results. Particular atten- tion is devoted to interpreting convergence empirics. The main ndings are:...

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: the standard practice of interpreting the parameters of log-linearized models estimated by ordinary least squares as elasticities can be highly misleading...

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory, in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an...