The present paper describes the modelling of regional labour markets in the newly developed dynamic spatial general equilibrium model RHOMOLO, where the labour market equilibrium is determined by firms' labour demand, a wage-curve determining unemployment, and inter- regional labour migration....

Over the last two decades the share of national income which accrues to labour has followed a marked downward trend across a host of industrialised countries. This paper reassesses the relative importance of several potential causes of this phenomenon. Overall, the findings suggest that lower...

This paper investigates the role of political representation in explaining regional variation in fiscal transfers in Belgium. Using Eurostat data for the years 1995 to 2008, we find that on average per capita cash fiscal transfers –consisting of the net amount of federal income taxes and...

Countries redistribute substantial amounts of wealth between regions through taxation and social security, even in the absence of an explicit regional policy. Economic theory suggests such redistribution might be distorting. This paper indeed finds that more redistribution leads to subsequent...

This paper derives a gravity equation for commuter flows from a simple spatial labor market model, and uses it to identify the effect of regional borders on commuting. This structural approach allows us to identify the relevant control variables and sources of potential omitted variable bias....

This paper analyses the wage demands of a sector-level monopoly union facing internationally mobile firms. A simple two-country economic geography model is used to describe how firms relocate: in function of international differences in production costs and market size. The union sets wages in...

This paper applies the Bond and Coombes (2007) algorithm to construct Travel-to-Work Areas for Belgium. We study how these functional labor markets evolved between 1981 and 2001 and find that the number of distinct regional labor markets decreased over time. For 2007, sector-specic...