New economic geography focuses on the impact of falling transport costs on the spatial distribution of activities. However, it disregards the role of technological innovations, which are central to modern economic growth, as well as the role of migration costs, which are a strong impediment to...

We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working-cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly...

Armchair evidence shows that many industries are made of a few big commercial or manufacturing firms, which are able to affect the market outcome, and of a myriad of small family-run businesses with very few employees, each of which has a negligible impact on the market. Examples can be found in...

We show that space matters in designing the optimal provision of local public goods (LPGs). Geography imposes particular institutional structure of local governments due to the overlapping of market areas associated with different LPGs. The optimum can be decentralized through local governments...

We consider a market in which a public firm competes against private firms, and ask what happens when the public firm is privatized. In the short run, privatization is harmful because all prices rise; the disciplinary role of the public firm is lost. In the long run, privatization leads to...

We analyse how the interplay between urban costs, wage wedges and trade costs may affect the inter-regional location of firms as well as the intra-urban location, within the central business district or in a secondary employment centre (SEC) of the selected region. In this way we investigate, on...

This Paper deals with collective decision making within a group of independent jurisdictions. The right to choose the public policy is delegated from the central authority of one of the jurisdictions through a bidding procedure among the group members. We identify the following trade-off:...

We study imperfect competition in the labor market when worker skills are continuously distributed within the population and a finite number of firms have different job requirements. The cost of training a worker depends on the difference between this worker's skill and the employer's needs....

This Paper investigates the impact of the heterogeneity of the labour force on the spatial distribution of activities. This goal is achieved by applying the tools of discrete choice theory to an economic geography model. We show that taste heterogeneity acts as a strong dispersion force. We also...

Cities are often viewed as places fostering employment. It is shown that the choice of a particular location within a city is a key factor for the creation of jobs by a new firm. This question is addressed in the context of a standard urban model in which existing firms are established at the...