This paper takes a new look at the issue of overseas sourcing of services. In framework in which comparative advantage is endogenous to agglomeration economies and factor mobility, the fragmentation of production made possible by the new communication technologies and low transportation costs...

This paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relativeendowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety. The paper demonstrates thatfirm reactions to trade liberalization generate endogenous Ricardian productivity responses at...

This paper derives a micro-founded gravity equation in general equilibrium based on a translog demand system that allows for endogenous markups and substitution patterns across goods. In contrast to standard CES-based gravity equations, trade is more sensitive to trade costs if the exporting...

While transport costs have fallen, the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs. In a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs, we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade.

We show in the framework of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous and productivity depends on the quality of the match between job and worker, trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-industry trade. The agglomeration force is the improvement...

This paper studies how firm heterogeneity in terms of productivity affects the balance between agglomeration and dispersion forces in the presence of pecuniary externalities through a selection model of monopolistic competition with variable mark-ups. It shows that firm heterogeneity matters....

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

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...

Large scale transport infrastructure investments connect both large metropolitan centers of production as well as small peripheral regions. Are the resulting trade cost reductions a force for the diffusion of industrial and total economic activity to peripheral regions, or do they reinforce the...

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, I exploit two reductions of tax breaks for commuting in 2003/4 and 2006/7 to estimate commuting costs' effect on the decision to switch job and move house. Standard theory predicts that higher commuting costs should lead to increased...