We derive and estimate an econometric model of export versus foreign production using firm-level data on foreign activities of German multinationals. Proximity-concentration theory which we derive our model from shows that firms face a trade-off between concentrating their production at home to...

This paper investigates the long-term trend and the underlying determinants of public sector centralization in Germany from 1871 until today. The institutional and the quantitative review of the German history provides no conclusive evidence for a continuous process of government centralization...

This paper generalizes Hotelling's (1931) theory of nonrenewable resources to situations where resource pools and their users are distributed spatially. Extraction and transport costs are assumed to be linear in the rate of extraction, but utilization of each deposit may require a setup cost....

This paper presents a New Economic Geography model with distortionary taxation and endogenized trade costs. Tax revenues finance a public good, infrastructure. We show that the introduction of costly public investment in infrastructure increases agglomerative tendencies. With respect to the...

This paper emphasises the importance of the political-institutional dimension in the understanding of the spatial distribution of economic activity. We introduce the notion of Territorial Authority Scale, which refers to the degree of devolution (towards sub-national tiers of government)...

This paper asserts that beyond certain scale thresholds several factors contribute to diseconomies of scale for individual production units, particularly with regard to the costs of non-renewable resource consumption. Economic instruments such as environmental taxes may induce a shift towards...

Whereas many empirical studies show that the internationalization of production is driven by falling distance costs, theoretical models of the endogenous emergence of multinational enterprises predict the opposite. This paper argues that this dichotomy can be resolved if the production process...

We consider a linear city model where both firms and consumers have to incur transport costs. Following a standard Hotelling (1929) type framework we analyze a duopoly where firms facing a continuum of consumers choose locations and prices, with the transportation rate being linear in distance....

This paper provides an analysis of outsourcing and trade in a spatial model – la Hotelling. In this setting, we discuss the trade-off between transport-cost-related disadvantages and outsourcing-induced production cost advantages of a large economy. The model gives a rich picture of possible...