The paper examines the foreign direct investment (FDI) spillover effects in developing countries and investigates the importance of the absorptive capacity of a firm and a country in realizing and facilitating FDI spillover. It uses data obtained from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys for 107...

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...

This paper proposes a spatial equilibrium model to quantify welfare losses from land market distortions in China. In the model, heterogeneous firms in a variety of sectors choose their locations across regions with costly trade, frictional labor migration, and land market distortions. We match...

Empirical studies in spatial economics have shown that agglomeration economies may be a source of the uneven distribution of economic activities and economic growth across cities and regions. Both localization and urbanization economies are hypothesized to foster agglomeration and growth, but...

This paper examines the industry-specific attenuation speed of agglomeration economies and its interplay with the large presence of state-owned enterprises in China. We achieve this focus by taking advantage of unique geo-coded administrative data on the universe of Chinese manufacturing firms....

This chapter examines the link between firm productivity and the population composition of the areas in which firms operate. We combine annual firm-level microdata on production, covering a large proportion of the New Zealand economy, with area-level workforce characteristics obtained from...

We quantify agglomeration spillovers by estimating the impact of the opening of a large manufacturing plant on the total factor productivity (TFP) of incumbent plants in the same county. We use the location rankings of profit-maximizing firms to compare incumbent plants in the county where the...

Formation of Special Economic Zone (SEZ) using agricultural land to promote industrialization has recently been one of most controversial policy issues in many developing economies including India. This paper critically theoretically evaluates the consequences of this policy in terms of a...