Any interesting model of economic geography must involve a tension between "centripetal" forces that tend to produce agglomerations and "centrifugal" forces that tend to pull them apart. This paper explores one such model, and shows that the model links together a number of themes in the...

How does a country's economic geography evolve along the development path? This paper documents recent employment growth in 18,961 regions in eight of the world's main economies. Overall, market potential is losing importance, and local density is gaining importance, as correlates of local...

When a product's product provision entails fixed costs, it will be made available only if a sufficient number of people want it. Some products are produced and consumed locally, so that provision requires not only a large group favoring the product but a large number nearby. Just as one has an...

An important element of the cost of distance is time taken in delivering final and intermediate goods. We argue that time costs are qualitatively different from direct monetary costs such as freight charges. The difference arises because of uncertainty. Unsynchronised deliveries can disrupt...

In a series of papers, my colleagues and I have demonstrated that levels of per capita income, economic growth, and other economic and demographic dimensions are strongly correlated with geographical and ecological variables such as climate zone, disease ecology, and distance from the coast....

This paper addresses the complex relationship between geography and macroeconomic growth. We investigate the ways in which geography may matter directly for growth, controlling for economic policies and institutions, as well as the effects of geography on policy choices and institutions. We find...

The new' economic geography focuses on the footloose-labor and the vertically-linked-industries models. Both are complex since they feature demand-linked and cost-linked agglomeration forces. I present a simpler model where agglomeration stems from demand-linked forces arising from endogenous...

Urban agglomerations arise at least in part out of the interaction between economies of scale in production and market size effects. This paper develops a simple spatial framework to develop illustrative models of the determinants of urban location, of the number and size of cities, and of the...

This paper develops a multi-stage general-equilibrium model of global value chains (GVCs) and studies the specialization of countries within GVCs in a world with barriers to international trade. With costly trade, the optimal location of production of a given stage in a GVC is not only a...

We use a temporary ban on inter-province shipping of live hogs induced by the 2018 outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in China as a natural experiment to study spatial mechanisms behind the dynamics of market integration. With a unique dataset of weekly provincial hog prices, we employ a...