While it is well known that some areas of the United States receive more immigrants than others, less is understood about the extent to which the character of immigration varies as well. There is much broader geographic variation in the skill and demographic composition of immigrants than...

This paper provides a different basis than previous analyses for regional bloc formation and regional migration. Due to low bargaining power and fixed costs, small states face a severe disadvantage in negotiations with the rest of the world and might benefit by forming a regional bloc. The study...

During the last few decades, aggregate wage growth has been very unevenly distributed across space in Germany. While wages in Southern German local labor markets rose by up to 28 log points, they increased only modestly or even declined in the north. Similar results apply to employment changes....

This paper studies how the strength of social ties are affected by the geographical location of other individuals and their social capital. We characterize the equilibrium in terms of both social interactions and social capital. We show that lower travel costs increase not only the interaction...

We examine how interaction choices depend on the interplay of social and physical distance, and show that agents who are more central in the social network, or are located closer to the geographic center of interaction, choose higher levels of interactions in equilibrium. As a result, the level...

We analyze the optimal regional pattern of public employment in an information-constrained second-best redistribution policy showing that regionally differentiated public employment can serve as an expenditure side tagging device, bypassing or relaxing the equity-efficiency trade-off. The...

We study spatial changes in labour market inequality for US states and MSAs using Census and American Community Survey data between 1980 and 2010. We report evidence of significant spatial variations in education employment shares and in the college wage premium for US states and MSAs, and show...

We study the importance of linguistic diversity in the workplace for workplace productivity. While cultural diversity might improve productivity through new ideas and innovation, linguistic diversity might increase communication costs and thereby reduce productivity. We apply a new measure of...

We empirically investigate the relationship between a country's economic complexity and the diversity in the birthplaces of its immigrants. Our cross-country analysis suggests that countries with higher birthplace diversity by one standard deviation are more economically complex by 0.1 to 0.18...

Using a unique database of over 20 million firms over two decades, we examine the industry sector and national institution drivers of the prevalence of women directors on supervisory and management boards in both public and private firms across 41 advanced and emerging European economies. We...