The development of the American economy was accompanied by significant spatial income inequalities between the northern and southern regions. While many factors contributed to northern industrialization and southern stagnation, an important factor was differences in their institutions. In the...

Governments go to great lengths to attract foreign multinationals because they are thought to raise the wages paid to their employees (direct effects) and to improve outcomes at local domestic firms (indirect effects). We construct the first U.S. employer-employee dataset with foreign ownership...

We use county and individual-level data from 1850 and 1860 to examine the economic impact of gaining access to a railroad. Previous studies have found that rail access was positively correlated with the value of agricultural land at a point in time, and have interpreted this correlation as...

We study the impact of intersectoral and interregional trade linkages in propagating disaggregated productivity changes to the rest of the economy. Using regional and industry data we obtain the aggregate, regional and sectoral elasticities of measured TFP, GDP, and employment to regional and...

We review historical patterns of economic geography' for the United States from the colonial period to the present day. The analysis is framed in terms of two geographic scales: regions and cities. The compelling reason for studying geographic areas of different scales is that models that...

This paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the United States. Regional exposure to technological change, as measured by specialization in routine task-intensive production and clerical occupations, is largely uncorrelated with regional...

What is the impact on intra-national trade and regional economic outcomes when the quality and lane-capacity of an existing paved road network is expanded significantly? We investigate this question for the case of Turkey, which undertook a large-scale public investment in roads during the...

While the economies of the fifteen countries that were in the European Union (EU15) in 2000 will continue to grow from now until 2040, they will not be able to match the surges in growth that will occur in South and East Asia. In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly...

Studies of the development of local economies often point to large-scale World War II military spending as a source of long-term economic growth, even though the spending declined sharply after the demobilization. We examine the longer term impact of the temporary war spending on county...

The incidence of bilateral trade costs is calculated here using neglected properties of the structural gravity model, disaggregated by commodity and region, and re-aggregated into forms useful for economic geography. For Canada's provinces, 1992- 2003, incidence is on average some five times...