We investigate how international trade and trade policy possibly affect the regional distribution of economic activities within a country involved in a process of economic integration. Our analysis reveals that the impact of decreasing international trade costs on the spatial distribution of...

We develop a multi-country Dixit-Stiglitz trade model and analyze how industry location and welfare respond to changes in: (i) transport frictions (e.g., infrastructure, transportation technology); and (ii) non-transport frictions (e.g., tariffs, standards and regulations). We show that changes...

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

The standard two-country model of international trade with monopolistic competition predicts a more-than-proportional relationship between a country's share of world production of a good and its share of world demand for that same good, a result known as the “home market effect”. We first...

We combine census and establishment-level data for 2001–2017 to study the impact of mass layoffs of big manufacturing plants on city-level population and its composition in Canada. We find that manufacturing plant closures and downsizing leadto a decline in subsequent population growth,...

We combine census and establishment-level data for 2001-2017 to study the impact of mass layoffs of big manufacturing plants on city-level population and its composition in Canada. We find that manufacturing plant closures and downsizing lead to a decline in subsequent population growth,...

We develop a model of commodity tax competition with monopolistically competitive internationally mobile firms, transport costs, and asymmetric country sizes. We investigate the impacts of non-cooperative tax setting, as well as of tax harmonization and changes in the tax principle, in both the...

We investigate where cities are located in a spatial economy and why they tend to get 'locked-in' at particular sites. Building on Fujita and Krugman (1995) we show that geography and/or transportation technology must exhibit some 'non-smoothness' for cities to possibly become 'locked-in' in...