We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services firms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially across locations. The result is a spatial endogenous growth...

This is the first paper to document the effect of health on the migration propensities of African Americans in the American past. Using both IPUMS and the Colored Troops Sample of the Civil War Union Army Data, I estimate the effects of literacy and health on the migration propensities of...

Using newly available data, we document that internal migrants do not enjoy the same access to local public goods and services as city residents in China. We estimate a spatial overlapping generations model with heterogeneous households to quantify the impact of the Hukou system on urban fiscal...

To what extent does high-growth entrepreneurship depend on skilled human capital? We estimate the impact of the inflow of inventors into a region on the founding of high-growth firms, instrumenting mobility with the county-level share of millions of inventor surnames in the 1940 U.S. Census....

Given the challenges in quantifying the role of human capital on economic development, measuring human capital itself becomes an important issue. It is desirable to have a comprehensive human capital measure that goes beyond the traditional measures based on education attainment, yet is...

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1569 sub-national regions from 110 countries covering 74 percent of the world's surface and 96 percent of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and...

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S....