This papers aims to understand the impact of nation-wide structural policies such as product market regulation in six upstream sectors and employment protection legislation and that of macroeconomic factors on the productivity growth of OECD regions. In particular we explore how this effect...

In contrast to what several papers have argued recently, we show that firm heterogeneity fosters agglomeration of economic activity. If firms are more similar with respect to their total factor productivity, each company faces a lower propensity to export. This renders the home market more...

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

This paper estimates agglomeration benefits based on city productivity differentials across five OECD countries (Germany, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States). It highlights the relationship between cities’ governmental fragmentation and productivity, and represents the first...

We estimate a model of urban productivity in which the agglomeration effect of density is enhanced by a metropolitan area’s stock of human capital. Estimation accounts for potential biases due to the endogeneity of density and industrial composition effects. Using new information on output per...

Firms cluster their economic activities to exploit technological and informational spillovers from other firms. Spillovers through the entry of multinational firms can be particularly beneficial to domestic firms because of their technological superiority. Yet, the importance of foreign firm's...

This paper analyzes the effects of geographical proximity and agglomeration of FDIs (foreign direct investments) on domestic firms in the privatized glass sector in the Czech Republic. The motivation for this research is based on the scant evidence in Central and Eastern Europe of the effects of...

Using firm-level data from France, we document that the shift of economic activity from manufacturing to services over the last few decades has been urban-biased: structural change has been more pronounced in areas with higher population density. This bias can be accounted for by the location...

Larger Indian firms selling inputs to other firms tend to have more customers, tend to be used more intensively by their customers, and tend to have larger customers. Motivated by these regularities, I propose a novel empirical model of trade featuring endogenous formation of input-output...

Migration and pollution are two defining features of China's impressive growth perfor- mance over the last 30 years. In this paper we study the migration response to pollution in Chinese cities, and its consequences for productivity and welfare. We document a robust pattern in which skilled...