The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

This paper explores the relationship between routine-biased technological change and agglomeration economies. Using administrative data from the Netherlands, we first show that in dense areas, jobs are less routine-task intensive (i.e. less repetitive and automatable), meaning that jobs cover a...

We examine effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment losses across metropolitan area status and population size. Non-metropolitan and metropolitan areas of all sizes experienced significant employment losses, but the impacts are much larger in large metropolitan areas. Employment losses...

This paper examines the role of regional aggregation in measuring agglomeration externalities. Using Dutch administrative data, we define local labour markets (LLMs) based on the worker's commuting outcomes, gender and educational attainment, and show that high-educated workers and male workers...

We develop a model in which ethnic minorities can either assimilate to the majority's norm or reject it by trading off higher productivity and wages with a greater social distance to their culture of origin. We show that "oppositional" ethnic minorities reside in more segregated areas, have...

We analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on U.S. county population, employment, and real income growth. Our findings suggest that government organization matters for local economic growth, but that the impacts vary by government unit and by economic indicator. We find that single-purpose...

This paper explores the mobility patterns of elder workers in the United States, with a focus on mobility to and from work (e.g., commuting) across metropolitan areas and metropolitan population sizes. Using detailed time diaries from the American Time Use Survey for the years 2003-2018,...

Persistent productivity gains to rural-urban migrants have been documented by a number of researchers. One interpretation of this result is that individuals learn higher value skills in cities than they would have learned in less dense areas. Another explanation for this result, however, is that...

Previous research suggests that the local stock of human capital creates positive externalities within local labor markets and plays an important role in regional economic development. However, there is still considerable uncertainty over what types of human capital are most important. Both...