This paper introduces cultural gravity as a new concept for analyzing socio-economic disparities among immigrants. It tests the existence of cultural gravity effects on the geographic concentration and human capital productivity of immigrants. Using cultural distance as a proxy for the local...

Large shocks, such as natural disasters, are often found to have little or no effect on the equilibrium distribution of economic activity across space. Two apparently competing theoretical explanations for this phenomenon are the increasing returns theory and the locational fundamentals theory....