Trade costs are crucial in new economic geography (NEG) models. The unavailability of actual trade costs data requires the approximation of trade costs. Most NEG studies do not deal with the ramifications of the particular trade costs specification used. This paper shows that the specification...

For reasons of analytical tractability, new economic geography (NEG) models treat geography in a very simple way: attention is either confined to a simple 2-region or to an equidistant multi-region world. As a result, the main predictions regarding the impact of e.g. diminishing trade costs are...

We develop a spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the efficiency and distributional impacts of the leading air quality regulation in the United States: the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). We link our economic model to an integrated assessment model for air pollutants which...

We study the effect of spatial inequality on economic activity. Given that the relationship is highly simultaneous in nature, we use exogenous variation in geographic features to construct an instrument for spatial inequality, which is independent from any man-made factors. Inequality measures...

We incorporate the now standard knowledge-capital model of multinational firms in a new economic geography setting. The theoretical predictions of our model suggest that unskilled labor mobility leads to less concentration of production than skilled labor mobility does. This is in line with...

We extent a solvable version of the core-periphery agglomeration model to four countries located in two regions. The paper shows that there might still be a race to the bottom in capital income tax rates despite agglomeration rents earned by the mobile factor. We find that intra-regional tax...

Increasing-returns-to-scale imperfect competition trade models predict a more than proportionate relationship between the larger country's share in world endowments and its share in producing firms: the so called home market effect (HME). While this result plays a key role in empirical testing,...

The paper combines an economic-geography model of agglomeration and periphery with a model of species diversity and looks at optimal policies of biodiversity conservation. The subject of the paper is natural biodiversity, which is inevitably impaired by anthropogenic impact. Thus, the economic...

The 2008 Nobel prize for economics was awarded to Paul Krugman for three papers -Krugman (1979, 1980, 1991). In this paper we illustrate that, indeed, these three papers are closely connected. We present - a summary of - the papers using a unified framework. Central in the discussion is the...

For reasons of analytical tractability, new economic geography (NEG) models treat geography in a very simple way: attention is either confined to a simple 2-region or to an equidistant multi-region world. As a result, the main predictions regarding the impact of e.g. diminishing trade costs are...