The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) provides a unique window onto the effects of a reciprocal trade agreement on an industrialized economy (Canada). For industries that experienced the deepest Canadian tariff cuts, employment fell by 12 percent and labour productivity rose by 15 percent...

European regions have experienced a polarisation of their unemployment rates between 1986 and 1996, as regions with intermediate rates have been driven by changes in regional employment, only partly offset by labour force changes. Regions'' outcomes have closely followed those of neighbouring...

Why are some cities specialised and others diversified? What are the advantages and disadvantages of urban specialisation and diversity? To what extent does the structure of cities, and the activities of the firms and people in them, change over time? How does the sectoral composition of cities...

We document and then develop a model explaining and relating changes in firms'' organisation and in urban structure. Sharing of business services by headquarters and of sector-specific intermediates by production plants within a city reduces costs, while congestion increases with city size. A...

This review of recent contributions reveals common conclusions about the effects of integration on location. For high trade costs, the need to supply markets locally encourages firms to spread across different regions. Integration weakens the incentives for self-sufficiency and for intermediate...

A simple model of process innovation is proposed, where firms learn about their ideal production process by making prototypes. We build around this a dynamic general equilibrium model, and derive conditions under which diversified and specialised cities coexist. New products are developed in...

This paper analyses how the degree of regional integration affects regional differences in production structures and income levels. With high transport costs, industry is spead across regions to meet final consumer demad. As transport costs fall, increasing returns interacting with labour...

We provide empirical evidence on the role of labour market pooling in determining the spatial concentration of UK manufacturing establishments. This role arises because large concentrations of employment iron out idiosyncratic shocks and improve establishments’ ability to adapt their...

This paper considers the location effects of geographically discriminatory trade policy. A preferential move towards a customs union pulls industry into the integrating countries. When internal barriers fall below some critical level, input-output links between imperfectly competitive firms lead...

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus increases in the land area used by individual households. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.5%...