We test a New Economic Geography (NEG) model for U.S. counties, employing a new strategy that allows us to bring the full NEG model to the data, and to assess selected elements of this model separately. We find no empirical support for the full NEG model. Regional wages in the U.S. do not...

Does regional unemployment increase or rather decrease entrepreneurial activity? Although this question has been hotly debated among researchers for decades the answers yielded so far are ambiguous and inconclusive. The paper proposes an innovative approach that takes not only interregional...

Redding and Sturm (2008) use the German division as a natural experiment to study the importance of market access for regional development. They show empirically that cities close to the East-West German border experienced a significant decline in population growth due to division. I argue that...

The paper studies the impact of a switch from free to charged highway provision on firm numbers and private sector employment in a cross-section of Portuguese municipalities. It exploits the fact that highway tolls in Portugal were unexpectedly raised in reaction to the financial crisis to...

Relational contracts when employed as a tool of economic policy create mutual dependency between State and enterprises. This bluntly contradicts the principles of „Ordnungspolitik" as the key policy device to ensure efficiency on the microeconomic level and growth on the macroeconomic level....

Rail commuter traffic in Germany has undergone substantial institutional changes since the railway reform of 1994 has come into effect. Short-distance rail passenger transport has been "regionalized". From 1996 onwards, regional authorities— either on the Länder-layer or even below on the...

Globalization and European integration are substantially changing the interregional division of labor in Europe and the industrial specialization of European regions, thereby potentially affecting the extent of disparities between countries and regions. This paper reviews several theoretical...

The ongoing process of European integration is likely to increase trade and factor mobility thereby increasing interregional competition and affecting the interregional division of labor. From a theoretical standpoint, rising specialization and polarization of European regions may result from...

National borders substantially matter in passenger air traffic. Empirical estimates based upon a new data set on domestic and international departures from German airports indicate that the German border reduces air traffic activity by a factor of four to five. This result adds a further piece...

This paper solves one of the puzzles in the analysis of regional and industrial distributions of economic activity, the discrepancy between absolute and relative measures. It shows that the difference between an absolute and a relative Theil index of localization can be expressed in terms of...