With the completion of EMU, tax competition and, more in general, locational competition is high on the EU policy agenda. In contrast to the standard neo-classical reasoning, recent advances in the theory of trade and location have shown that tax competition does not necessarily lead to a...

It is a stylized fact that city size distributions are rather stable over time. Explanations for city growth and the resulting city-size distributions fall into two broad groups. On the one hand there are theories that assume city growth to be a random process and this process can result in a...

In the paper we analyse, ten years after the German unification, the relevance of modern theoretical developments on trade, location and growth for East Germany using sectoral and regional data. Given our discussion of stylized facts about industry growth, economies of scale and differences in...

In this paper we find evidence that the new economic geography approach is able to describe and explain the spatial characteristics of an economy, in our case the German economy. Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by...

The literature on international transfers largely ignores the fact that transfers are often given in the form of money. We analyze both the welfare consequences of financial transfers for the donor and the recipient, and their impact on the current account. Under normal circumstances transfer...

With the completion of EMU, tax competition and, more in general, locational competition is high on the EU policy agenda. In contrast to the standard neo-classical reasoning, recent advances in the theory of trade and location have shown that tax competition does not necessarily lead to a...

Based on a new economic geography model by Puga (1999), we use the equilibrium wage equation to estimate two key structural model parameters for the NUTS II EU regions. The estimation of these parameters enables us to come up with an empirically based free-ness of trade parameter. We then...

In this paper we argue that there have been two monopolistic competition revolutions. The first was started by Joan Robinson and Edward Chamberlin in the 1930s but failed to have much impact on economic theory. The second was initiated by Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz in the early 1970s....

Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias, called ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias, referred to as spin, reflects the outlet's attempt to simply create a memorable story....