We document several empirical regularities regarding the evolution of urban structure in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1980-1990. These regularities relate to changes in resident population, employment, occupations, as well as the number and size of establishments in...

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue....

We estimate the factors determining specialization of crop choice at the level of individual fields, distinguishing between the role of natural advantage (soil characteristics) and economies of density (scale economies achieved when farmers plant neighboring fields with the same crop). Using...

Between 1660 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by inheritance rules and other legal legacies. The loosening of...

We use Japanese prefectural wage and land price data to estimate the magnitude of agglomeration effects in manufacturing and finance. We also examine the range of agglomeration effects by estimating the extent to which they diminish with distance, using a specification that encompasses the polar...

What motivates regional governments to subsidize firm relocations and what are the implications of the subsidy competition among them? In this paper, I address these questions using a quantitative economic geography model which I calibrate to U.S. states. I show that states have strong...

When a country is the recipient of large-scale, politically motivated immigration -- as has been the case for Israel in recent years -- the initial impact is to reduce real wages. Over the longer term, however, the endogenous response of investment, together with increasing returns, may well...

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of observed levels of migration using a quantitative multi-sector model of the world economy calibrated to aggregate and firm-level data. Our framework features cross-country labor productivity differences, international trade, remittances, and a...

There is abundant evidence that immigrant networks are associated with larger exports from the country where they settle to their countries of origin. The direction of causality of this association is less clearly established. Also, we do not know to what extent these increased exports are due...