Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution of...

We study the impact of falling trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Two regions between which labour is mobile form each country, but there is no international factor mobility. Commodities can be traded both...

This Paper first develops a tractable economic geography model we use to investigate the decline of transport costs as a cause of regional inequalities. Next, we perform a structural estimation of this model using a new dataset on road transport costs between the 341 French Employment Areas. We...

Tax reform proposals in the spirit of the 'flat tax' model typically aim to reduce three parameters: the average tax burden, the progressivity of the tax schedule, and the complexity of the tax code. We explore the implications of changes in these three parameters on entrepreneurial activity,...

It is well understood that the two most popular empirical models of location choice - conditional logit and Poisson - return identical coefficient estimates when the regressors are not individual specific. We show that these two models differ starkly in terms of their implied predictions. The...

In this paper, we study the impact of a French enterprise zones program---the ``Zones Franches Urbaines'' (ZFUs) policy---on establishments' location decisions. Our empirical analysis is based on a micro-geographic dataset which provides exhaustive information on the location of establishments...

This paper presents a model of strategic locational choice by duopolistic firms in an urban area where consumer locations are endogenous and where a public facility is exogenously fixed. A welfare analysis taking their strategic behaviour into account is conducted. It is shown that the firms'...

We explore the role of human capital investments in the location decisions of firms. We show that whether human capital investments act as a force for or against concentration depends on who is undertaking them and whether they are industry- or firm-specific. We also discuss the empirical...

We develop a model in which two regional governments compete for a mobile oligopolistic firm by publicly providing local inputs. The central mechanism of our model is the interaction of an agglomeration advantage (partial non-rivalness of the local input) and an agglomeration disadvantage (fixed...

Low corporate taxes can help attract new firms. This is the main mechanism underpinning the standard 'race-to-the-bottom' view of tax competition. A recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by formalizing the argument that agglomeration forces can reduce firms' sensitivity to tax...