China’s Hukou system poses severe restrictions on labor mobility. This paper assesses the possible consequences of relaxing these restrictions for China’s internal economic geography. We base our analysis on a new economic geography (NEG) model. First, we estimate the important model...

In this paper we want to shed some light on the empirical relevance of the new economic geography. Using one of the central features of the core new economic geography models, namely that wages have the tendency to fall the further one moves away from centres of economic activity, we investigate...

Abstract Two aspects of New Economic Geography models are often singled out for criticism, especially by geographers: the treatment of geography, typically as a pre-given, fixed and highly idealized abstract geometric space; and the treatment of history, typically as ‘logical’ time (the...