Recovery of causal relationships in data is an essential part of scholarly inquiry in the social sciences. This chapter discusses strategies that have been successfully used in urban and regional economics for recovering such causal relationships. Essential to any successful empirical inquiry is...

Spatial connectivity of renewable resources induces a spatial externality in extraction. We explore the consequences of decentralized spatial property rights in the presence of spatial externalities. We generalize the notion of unitization - developed to enhance cooperative extraction of oil and...

Geography shapes economic outcomes in a major way. This paper uses spatial empirical methods to detect and analyze trade patterns in a historical data set on Chinese rice prices. Our results suggest that spatial features were important for the expansion of interregional trade. Geography...

Recent models in economic geography suggest that there may be very large numbers of equilibrium spatial structures. Simulations suggest, however, that the structures that emerge are surprisingly orderly, and often seem approximately to follow simple rules about the spacing of urban sites. This...

The observed uneven distribution of economic activity across space is influenced by variation in exogenous geographical characteristics and endogenous interactions between agents in goods and factor markets. Until recently, the theoretical literature on economic geography had focused on stylized...

In this paper, I study the effect of economic integration with the United States on state-industry employment growth in Mexico. I disentangle the effects of two opposing forces on regional labor demand: transport-cost considerations, which, all else equal, encourage firms to relocate their...

We study the urban structure of the City of Detroit. Following several decades of decline, the city's current urban structure is clearly not optimal for its size, with a business district immediately surrounded by a ring of largely vacant neighborhoods. We propose a model with residential...

This essay describes and evaluates state and local business tax incentives in the United States. In 2014, states spent between $5 and $216 per capita on incentives for firms in the form of firm-specific subsidies and general tax credits, which mostly target investment, job creation, and research...