The skill gap in geographical mobility is entirely driven by workers who report moving for a new job. A natural explanation lies in the large expected surplus accruing to skilled job matches. Just as large surpluses ease the frictions which impede job search in general, they also help overcome...

This paper examines the impact of mass media and information and commu- nications technologies (ICT) as knowledge-based infrastructures on economic development. The results suggest that both mass media and ICT penetra- tion are negatively associated with corruption. This result holds across both...

We provide a critique of the methods that have been used to derive measures of income risk and draw attention to the importance of demographic factors as a source of income risk. We also propose new measures of the contribution to total income risk of demographic and labour market factors....

We show that in an open-economy OLG model, the interaction between growth differentials and household credit constraints, more severe in fast-growing countries, can explain three prominent global trends: a divergence in private saving rates between advanced and emerging economies, large net...

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 develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs).Using micro-data from the United States from 1880-2000, we find an increase in the employment share...

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more productive via various agglomeration economies. This paper provides a...

This review of recent contributions reveals common conclusions about the effects of integration on location. For high trade costs, the need to supply markets locally encourages firms to spread across different regions. Integration weakens the incentives for self-sufficiency and for intermediate...