In this paper, I examine how the growth of offshore assembly in Mexico has affected manufacturing activity in U.S. border cities. Under the offshore assembly provision of the U.S. tariff schedule, goods that are assembled abroad using U.S.-manufactured components receive preferential tariff...

The US-Mexico free-trade debate included some theoretical assertions that were then used as arguments against trade and investment liberalization. (1) Trade liberalization increases the degree to which production is internationally relocated in response to environmental restrictions...

A two-region model is presented in which an imperfectly competitive firm produces a good with increasing returns at the plant level, and in which shipping costs exist between the two markets. Production of the good causes local pollution, and regional governments can levy pollution taxes or...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple New Economic Geography model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the...

This paper tests whether differences across states in pollution regulation affect the location of manufacturing activity in the U.S. Plant-level data from the Census Bureau's Longitudinal Research Database is used to identify new plant births in each state over the 1963-1987 period. This is...

Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income and unemployment rates. A growing class of "place based" policies attempt to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities or regions. Place...

This paper discusses the prevalence of Silicon Valley-style localizations of individual manufacturing industries in the United States. Several models in which firms choose locations by throwing darts at a map are used to test whether the degree of localization is greater than would be expected...

This paper investigates competition between jurisdictions in the context of cross-border shopping for state lottery tickets. We first develop a simple theoretical model in which consumers choose between state lotteries and face a trade-off between travel costs and the price of a fair gamble,...

We consider a model with several regions whose technological ability and factor endowments are identical and in which transport costs between regions are non-negligible. Nonetheless, certain goods are sometimes produced by multiple firms all of which are located in the same region. These goods...