This paper models the relationship between countries' distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education, and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both exports and intermediate imports, reducing the amount of value added left to...

We leverage detailed data on vessel movements and shipping contracts to shed new light on world trade costs and trade flows. The data reveal new facts about shipping patterns, and motivate us to build a framework modeling the behavior of exporters and ships. Our framework has two novel features:...

What are the effects of increased trade in goods and services on the trade balance? We study the effects of reducing transport costs in a Ricardian model with complete asset markets. Trade integration has three effects on the structure of the economy: a reduction in the home bias in consumption,...

This paper reviews recent research on geography and trade. One of the key empirical findings over the last decade has been the role of geography in shaping the distributional consequences of trade. One of the major theoretical advances has been the development of quantitative spatial models that...

Information technology (IT) matters to prosperity. The top patenters are increasingly IT companies. We use data on US patents to document four trends in IT patenting. First, firm-level concentration in IT patenting is increasing over time. Second, geographic concentration in IT patenting is...

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...

One account of spatial concentration focuses on productivity advantages arising from market size. We investigate this for forty regions of Japan. Our results identify important effects of a region's own size, as well as cost linkages between producers and suppliers of inputs. Productivity links...

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...

This paper develops a two-region, two-sector general equilibriun model of location. The location of agricultural production is fixed, but ionopolistcally competitive manufacturing finns choose their location to maximize profits. If transportation costs are high, returns to scale weak, and the...

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...