This paper empirically examines the regional effects of sharing a single currency on bilateral trade with other European Union partners. It takes advantage of a gravity specification of bilateral trade between 17 Spanish regions and 13 European countries over the period 1997-2004, which in turn...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

Higher ability workers benefit more from bigger cities while housing costs there are higher for everyone, and yet there is little sorting on ability. A possible explanation is that young individuals have an imperfect assessment of their ability, and, when they learn about it, early decisions...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a ‘flat...

We apply a new approach to a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross-border equity flows between 14 countries, 1989-96. The remarkably good results have strong implications for theories of asset trade. We find that the geography of information heavily determines the pattern of international...

Building on previous studies on perceptions of inequality, welfare and risk we investigate the structure of individuals' rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to the...

Economists have a well-developed theory of value but the theory of why people hold the values they do is rudimentary at best. In spite of the fact that it is common to argue that values are important, most work on values is normative and the positive theory of values is relatively under-...

The second-order stochastic dominance criterion for inequality analysis introduced by Atkinson (1970) covers nearly all well-known inequality indices. The same cannot be said, in respect of poverty indices, for the second-order stochastic dominance criterion for poverty analysis introduced by...

Should raising the growth rate of GDP per capita be a policy goal of governments in general, and of the British government in particular? Many people would say no, for the following reasons: 1) GDP is hopelessly flawed as a measure of welfare; 2) Growing GDP is pointless since most people don’t...

This paper investigates the extent to which certain social characteristics and personal attributes could help explain income inequality in Greece. This analysis is quite revealing for understanding and explaining income idfferences among certain population subgroups with apparent policy...