When worker commutes are suboptimal, quits and moves are related. Either a quit, a move, or both can achieve an optimal commute. However, with fixed costs to quitting and moving, a quit or move alone is more likely than both together. Payroll records of a firm which relocated from the central...

This paper estimates a multinomial logit model of the location decisions of new immigrants to the United States. Data from the 5- percent Public Use Samples of the 1970 and 1980 Censuses of Population are used to study the geographic distribution of immigrants who arrived after 1965. The major...

To spur entrepreneurship and economic growth, an increasing number of countries have introduced immigration policies that provide visas to skilled entrepreneurs. This paper investigates whether these policies influence the founding location choice of immigrant founders, by leveraging the...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...

Why are some places more entrepreneurial than others? We use Census Bureau data to study local determinants of manufacturing startups across cities and industries. Demographics have limited explanatory power. Overall levels of local customers and suppliers are only modestly important, but new...

This paper examines the impact of state and local tax differentials on the location of industry using a panel data set of manufacturing firm startups. The number of firm births is modeled as a Poisson count process and the estimation technique explicitly accounts for unobserved location or state...

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and industries contribute to the diffusion of that knowledge? Here we measure the industry, occupation, and location specific knowledge carried by workers from one...

Conventional hedonic techniques for estimating the value of local amenities rely on the assumption that households move freely among locations. We show that when moving is costly, the variation in housing prices and wages across locations may no longer reflect the value of differences in local...

We use data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program to study the causal effects of location on earnings. Starting from a model with employer and employee fixed effects, we estimate the average earnings premiums associated with jobs in different commuting zones (CZs) and...

Employment at multinational enterprises (MNEs) responds to wages at the extensive margin, when an MNE enters a foreign location, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates. We present an MNE model and conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification. Prior...