This paper develops a micro-founded city systems model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when production processes involve environmental pollution. Our analysis delivers two key insights. First, if an optimal scheme to...

The core-periphery model by Krugman (1991) has two 'dramatic' implications: catastrophic agglomeration and locational hysteresis. We study this seminal model with CES instead of Cobb-Douglas upper tier preferences. This small generalization suffices to change these stark implications. For a wide...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. This reflects the fact that these models rely heavily on specific...

Entrepreneurs who decide to enter an industry are faced with different levels of effective entry costs in different countries. These costs are heavily influenced by economic policy. What is not well understood is how international trade affects the government incentive to impact on entry costs,...

This paper pursues three aims. First, we provide a review of current theoretical advances which pertain to the relationship between trade, FDI and labor markets. We do so under the following (not mutually exclusive) headings: (1) slicing-up the value added chain and the turn to a task-based...