This volume was prepared by Jens Ruhose while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes four self-contained chapters that contribute to the understanding of the...

Have Irish, German or Italian settlers arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century left an institutional trace which determines economic development differences to this day? Does the national origin of migrants matter for long-term development? This paper explores whether the distinct...

This paper seeks to investigate the occupational segregation of white women in the U.S. at the local labor market level, exploring whether the segregation of this group is a homogeneous phenomenon across the country or there are important disparities in the opportunities that these women meet...

This paper illustrates the effect of employment in the tradable sector on employment in the non-tradable sector in the same city with a simple model. The model predicts a significant positive local employment multiplier that increases in size with the unemployment rate. It also predicts that the...

This paper examines whether population shrinkage leads to changes in the urban hierarchy in terms of relative sizes of cities and their functions onomic geography. We work backwards in a racetrack economy with eight cities in a long-run equilibrium. Initial distribution of population is chosen...

Policy makers at all levels of government believe that one of the key drivers of local economic growth is new businesses. Therefore, governments design policy with the intention of attracting businesses with the hopes that this will create future growth in struggling areas. Over the past few...

I show that the nontradable sector of a regional economy benefits from attracting jobs in the tradable sector. I find that on average one new job in a tradable industry in a city will attract 1.02 extra jobs in the nontradable sector of that same city. This local multiplier effect increases with...

We study the regional representation of foreign workers from each EU-27 country in German regions. For most of the German neighboring countries, we find that distance significantly matters for the workplace location in Germany. The striking exception is Poland. For non-neighboring countries,...

Building on work funded by the ESPON 2013 Program, the paper analyses the regional trajectories of development of a "creative workforce" among its active population against regional economic growth, measured by changes in per capita GDP over the period 2001-2008 in 317 NUTS2 regions of the ESPON...