Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various...

Parochial politics is typically associated with poor leadership and low levels of public good provision. This paper explores the possibility that community involvement in politics need not necessarily worsen governance and, indeed, can be efficiency-enhancing when the context is appropriate....

Using the mass closure of development zones in 2004 as a natural experiment, we examine the causal effect of development zones on firm level TFP in China. The difference-in-difference estimator shows that on average, loss of development zone policies results in 6.5% loss of firms' TFP....

We study optimal spatial policies in a quantitative trade and geography framework with spillovers and spatial sorting of heterogeneous workers. We characterize the spatial transfers that must hold in efficient allocations, as well as labor subsidies that can implement them. There exists scope...

The economic convergence of American regions has greatly slowed, and rates of long-term non-employment have even been diverging. Simultaneously, the rate of non-employment for working age men has nearly tripled over the last 50 years, generating a terrible social problem that is...

Many development policies, such as placement of infrastructure or local economic development schemes, are “place-based.” Such policies are generally intended to stimulate private sector investment and economic growth in the treated place, and as such they are difficult to appraise and...

Over the last 30 years, the Chinese government has invested in new industrial parks with the intent of stimulating urban economic growth. The central government delegates the site selection decision to provincial leaders. A principal-agent issue arises because the central government prioritizes...

Many studies of regional disparity in China have focused on the preferential policies received by the coastal provinces. We decomposed the location dummies in provincial growth regressions to obtain estimates of the effects of geography and policy on provincial growth rates in 1996-99. Their...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: a core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...

Should the national government undertake policies aimed at strengthening the economies of particular localities or regions? Agglomeration economies and human capital spillovers suggest that such policies could enhance welfare. However, the mere existence of agglomeration externalities does not...