Several Chinese cities have invested billions of dollars to construct new industrial parks. These place based investments solve the land assembly problem which allows many productive firms to co-locate close to each other. The resulting local economic growth creates new opportunities for real...

When economic activity is concentrated over space or over time, it is more efficient. Most production occurs in geographic hot spots, and most production occurs between 9 and 12 in the morning and 1 to 5 in the afternoon on weekdays. The thick-market efficiencies that encourage the concentration...

The distribution of firms in space is far from uniform. Some locations host the most productive large firms, while others barely attract any. In this paper, I study the sorting of heterogeneous firms across locations and analyze policies designed to attract firms to particular regions...

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...

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories - increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Age to the modern era. We also consider the...

We provide sufficient statistics for nominal and real wage exposure to productivity shocks in a constant elasticity economic geography model. These exposure measures summarize the first-order general equilibrium elasticity of nominal and real wages in each location with respect to productivity...

The growth of high-technology clusters in the United States suggests the presence of strong regional agglomeration effects that reflect proximity to universities or other research institutions. Using data on licensed patents from the University of California, Stanford University, and Columbia...

In recent empirical literature on spatial agglomeration, many papers find evidence consistent with location-specific externalities of some sort. Our willingness to accept evidence of agglomeration economies depends on how well key estimation problems have been addressed. Three issues are...

The degree of geographic concentration of individual manufacturing industries in the U.S. has declined only slightly in the last twenty years. At the same time, new plant births, plant expansions, contractions and closures have shifted large quantities of employment across plants, firms, and...