This paper analyses the political determination of transportation costs in a new economic geography model. In a benchmark case with certainty about where agglomeration takes place, a majority of voters favour economic integration and the resulting equilibrium is an industrialised core and a...

How does intranational factor mobility shape the welfare effects of a trade shock? I provide evidence that during WWI, a demand shock emanated from belligerent countries and affected neutral Spain. Within Spain, labor predominantly reallocated locally, while the most affected provinces...

This paper draws on recent field work within South Asia and an extensive review of secondary data to examine the dynamics of cross border trade and investment in South Asia, exploring the potential for, and obstacles to, such trade through the lens of a sector that is salient throughout South...

The slow progress and modest achievements of regional integration in South Asia have generated a huge amount of skepticism about its role as an effective strategy of growth. The present study, however, argues that there is need to forge deeper integration within the region. It examines the...

This paper examines changes in regional inequality in India in the 1990s, using data for 59 of India's 78 agro-climatic regions from the National Sample Survey. It extends the work of Singh et al. (2003) in two ways. First, it allows for differences in baseline growth performance across...

This paper examines changes in regional inequality in India in the 1990s, using data for 210 of India's districts, spread across nine states. It provides a finer-grained quantitative analysis of growth patterns than has hitherto been attempted for India. The methodology is that of cross-section...

We use transaction-level data to study changes in the concentration of US imports. Concentration has fallen in the typical industry, while it is stable by industry and country of origin. The fall in concentration is driven by the extensive margin: the number of exporting firm has grown, and the...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the strategic motive for protection present in trade and agglomeration models, in the so-called new economic geography framework, is sensitive to the standard assumption that there is a sole agglomeration industry. We first investigate unilateral...

We propose a comprehensive analysis of a country's price and non-price competitiveness that accounts for changes in the value added content of trade by combining two datasets – highly disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade with internationally integrated Supply and Use Tables from the WIOD...

This paper analyzes the effect of trade liberalization on government spending in a general equilibrium model with a continuum of industries supplying tradable and nontradable goods under monopolistic competition. Trade liberalization is modeled as the opening up of product markets between two...