This paper analyses the political determination of transportation costs in a new economic geography model. In a benchmark case with certainty about where agglomeration takes place, a majority of voters favour economic integration and the resulting equilibrium is an industrialised core and a...

Firms agglomerate in one region due to increasing returns, input-output linkages and transportation costs. In the de-industrialised region factor prices are lower and a new technology may be profitable to adopt in that region instead, inducing a change in the technological leadership. This paper...

Adding majority voting to a simple new economic geography model, we analyse under which circumstances politically determined barriers to international firm relocation exist. Two countries, differing in market size, consider abolishing restrictions on firm mobility. Eliminating these restrictions...

We analyse the political determination of transportation costs in an analytically solvable core-periphery model. In a benchmark case with certainty about where agglomeration takes place, we find that a majority of voters prefers low trade costs and the resulting equilibrium is an industrialised...

Firms agglomerate in one region due to increasing returns, input-output linkages and transportation costs. In the de-industrialised region factor prices are lower and a new technology may be profitable to adopt in that region instead, inducing a change in the technological leadership. This paper...

This paper analyses the political determination of transportation costs in a new economic geography model. In a benchmark case with certainty about where agglomeration takes place, a majority of voters favour economic integration and the resulting equilibrium is an industrialised core and a...

We analyse a two-stage location-quantity game with many firms and two regions. We show that the firms will never agglomerate in the same location if transportation is costly between the regions. We also analyse the effects of differences in market size and economic integration on the allocation...

Recent research on endogenous market segmentation finds that a monopoly’s expected profit under perfectly segmented markets increases (relative to its profits under perfectly integrated markets) with exchange rate volatility. The firm thus has an incentive to make consumer resale increasingly...