We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services firms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially across locations. The result is a spatial endogenous growth...

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S....

Why did some countries learn to grow up to financial stability and others not? We explore this question by surveying the key determinants and major policy responses to banking, currency, and debt crises between 1880 and present. We divide countries into three groups: leaders, learners, and...

For whom has earnings risk changed, and why? To answer these questions, we develop a filtering method that estimates parameters of an income process and recovers persistent and temporary earnings for every individual at every point in time. Our estimation flexibly allows for first and second...

We study the effect of mean-preserving labor reallocation on business cycle outcomes. We develop an empirical methodology using a local area's exposure to industry reallocation based on the area's initial industry composition and employment trends in the rest of the country over a full...

National industrial concentration in the U.S. has risen sharply since the early 1980s, but there remains dispute over whether local geographic concentration has followed a similar trend. Using near population data from the Economic Censuses, we confirm and extend existing evidence on national...

We study the joint process of urbanization and industrialization in the US economy between 1880 and 1940. We show that only a small share of aggregate industrialization is accounted for by the relocation of workers from remote rural areas to industrial hubs like Chicago or New York City....