This paper reviews the new economic geography literature, which accounts for the uneven distribution of economic activity across space in terms of a combination of love of variety preferences, increasing returns to scale and transport costs. After outlining the canonical core and periphery...

Petroleum exploration in Brazil is performed throughout a bidding process coordinated by the National Petroleum Agency (NPA), where the exploration and production (E&P) firms need to evaluate concessions performing financial and economic analyses routinely. Since oil is a public resource with...

Voters dealing with jurisdictional merger decisions face a trade-off between economies of scale and preference costs. Larger jurisdictions may offer cost advantages, yet the downside is that policies in larger units may be less aligned to voter preferences. Our study is the first to provide...