The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

In this paper, we consider fiscal competition between jurisdictions. Capital taxes are used to finance a public input and two public goods, one which benefits mobile skilled workers and one which benefits immobile unskilled workers. We derive the jurisdictions' reaction functions for different...

Studies of the joint time-use decisions of spouses have relied on joint estimation of time-use equations, sometimes assuming correlated errors across spouses' equations and sometimes directly examining the effects of one spouse's time use on another's, relying on panel data or instrumental...

The civil war in Syria has culminated into major refugee crises in its neighboring countries. By the end of 2013 more than half a million people were seeking shelter in cities and refugee camps in Turkey. We analyze how the Syrian refugee influx in Turkey has affected food and housing prices,...

This paper studies equilibrium unemployment in a two-region economy where homogeneous workers and jobs are free to move and the housing market clears. Because of the Internet, searching for a job in another region without first migrating there is nowadays much simpler than in the past....

The conventional model of immigrant earnings does not account for the correlation of outcomes across immigrant ethnic networks. We apply a spatial autoregressive network approach to account for the spill-over effects of migrant ethnic group economic resources and labour market outcomes. We...

We examine how city size affect wage levels of cities (agglomeration externality) and how it influence surrounding cities (spill-over effect) in China for the period between 1995 and 2009. Using spatial fixed-effect panel data models and allowing for endogenous and exogenous spatial dependence,...

Theory behind neighbourhood effects suggests that different geographies and scales affect individual outcomes. We argue that neighbourhood effects research needs to break away from the tyranny of neighbourhood and consider alternative ways to measure the wider socio-spatial context of people,...

This paper studies the fact that 37 percent of the internal migrants in China do not sign a labor contract with their employers, as revealed in a nationwide survey. These contract-free jobs pay lower hourly wages, require longer weekly work hours, and provide less insurance or on-the-job...

This paper considers a random search model where some locations provide sellers with better chances of meeting many buyers than other locations (for example popular shopping streets or the first page of a search engine). When sellers are heterogeneous in terms of the quality of their product...