How does export liberalization affect firm location choice and the spatial concentration of economic activity? We address these questions using the geo-coordinates of Chinese manufacturing firms and find that export widens inter-city and intra-city spatial disparities by reinforcing initially...

This paper studies the interdependence of economic geography and transportation technology. A two-region model is used to obtain the conditions for the modern transportation technology to be adopted in an economy. In particular, the impact of economic geography upon the adoption of the modern...

A long-standing goal of economic theory has been to explain the location of economic activity into agglomerated clusters and a periphery. In the past, two distinct fields independently examined this question: trade theory and spatial theory. The New Economic Geography (NEG) model developed by...

The impact of shocks in dynamic environments depends on how forward-looking agents anticipate the path of future fundamentals that shape their decisions. We incorporate flexible beliefs about future fundamentals in a general class of dynamic spatial models, allowing beliefs to be evolving,...

We provide a spatial theory of clean growth to assess the global impact of the rise of renewable energy. We model the details of the combined production and transmission network of electricity ("the grid") that determine the supply and losses of energy in space. The local rate of clean energy...