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 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...

A key issue in development economics is the explanation of core-periphery patterns around the world. Combining this issue with that of analyzing unilateral transfers (e.g. foreign aid) points in the direction of the use of New Economic Geography (NEG) models which, so far, has not been done...

Our paper extends the capital tax competition literature by incorporating heterogeneous capital and agglomeration. Our model nests the standard tax competition model as well as the special case in which there is agglomeration but no firm/capital heterogeneity and the opposite case, firm...

In this note, we show that labour market integration can be a double-edged sword. In the presence of local human capital externalities, integration and the ensuing agglomeration of skilled labour can cause a decline in human capital and the total wage sum (net of education costs). In particular,...

To control for product quality and eliminate the exchange rate volatility effect, we use the Japanese regional data to study the Penn effect - the positive relationship between price and income levels. Similarly to what is widely documented with international data, the price and income levels...

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...

Technological innovations facilitating e-commerce have well-documented effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector, but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown. By extending models of commodity tax competition to include...