This article presents a Ricardian model of trade with learning-by-doing to study the effect of barriers to trade in products with low growth potential on the long-run economic growth. The model shows that, when elasticity of demand for the product with a lower learning potential is lower than...

Distance related variables typically vary in a cross-section dimension but less so in a time dimension across cities, regions, or countries. The enlargement of the EU or the introduction of the euro, however, can be looked upon as integration shocks that are informative of the consequences of...

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this paper we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300-1861. The first contribution...

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic...

This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of regional house price cycles. Based on a newly available data set consisting of the 40 largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we introduce a wavelet transform based metric to study the housing cycle synchronization across MSAs. We...

We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

This paper looks at whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors. We first derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model à la Obstfeld-Rogoff, supplemented by a resource...