Tech clusters play a growing role in knowledge-based economies by accommodating high-tech firms and providing an environment that fosters location-dependent knowledge spillovers and promote R&D investments by .rms. Yet, not much is known about the economic conditions under which such entities...

This paper exploits a short-lived cooperation program between the U.S.S.R. and China, which led to the construction of 156 "Million-Rouble plants" in the 1950s. We isolate exogenous variation in location decisions due to the relative position of allied and enemy airbases and study the long-run...

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...

In this paper, we develop a network perspective on the welfare gains from trade in today’s internationally fragmented supply chains. Towards this end, we study a Ricardian trade model featuring trade in final and intermediate products, and introduce a novel comparative statics approach to...

This paper quantifies the origins of firm size heterogeneity when firms are interconnected in a production network. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper develops a set of stylized facts that motivate a model in which firms buy inputs from upstream suppliers...

The recent literature on firm-to-firm trade has documented salient empirical regularities of the buyer-seller network. We propose a simplistic re-interpretation of the classical Krugman (1980) model that accounts for surprisingly many of the empirical regularities. This re-interpretation relies...

We use de-identified data from Facebook to study the social integration of Syrian migrants in Germany, a country that received a large influx of refugees during the Syrian Civil War. We construct measures of migrants’ social integration based on Syrians’ friendship links to Germans, their...

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the study of international trade that leads to a measure of country openness that is quite different from the various alternatives proposed by the received literature. In contrast to these, our measure does not use indicators of aggregate trade...

How does immigration affect export performance? To answer this question we propose a unified empirical framework allowing to disentangle various mechanisms such as the role of networks in reducing bilateral transaction costs as well as productivity shifts arising from migration-induced knowledge...

This study finds that even small unexpected supply shocks propagate downstream through production networks and are amplified by firms with short-term financial constraints. The unexpected 2011 increase in the tax on imports purchased with foreign-sourced trade credit is examined using data...