Big cities specialize in services rather than manufacturing. Big-city establishments in services are larger than the national average while those in manufacturing are smaller. This paper proposes an explanation of these and other facts. The theory is developed in an economic geography model that...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a lsquo;flat...

This paper investigates the emergence of retail clusters on supply chains comprised of suppliers, retailers, and consumers. An agent-based model is employed to study retail location choice in a market of homogeneous goods and a market of complementary goods. On a circle comprised of discrete...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

This paper investigates the impact of labor markets and economies of agglomeration on firms location. We show that the existence of a lower bound on wage (e.g. a minimum wage or a reservation wage) introduces asymmetric location of firms. Moreover, changes in that lower bound or in global...

Departing from research on expanding, high-technology industries, we study the impact of agglomeration in a declining, low-technology industry. The setting is U.S. footwear manufacturing between 1975 and 1991, when import competition rendered local support critical for survival. We examine how...

The mechanisms driving regional clustering are examined by exploring two theories: agglomeration economies and organizational reproduction. While organizational reproduction through spinoffs dominates clusters' early stages of growth, in clusters populated by small, vertically disintegrated...

This study suggests a model for the agglomerative behaviour of MNEs with local competitors. Relying on foreign MNEs’ spatial distribution across 686 Italian Local Labor Systems, we find that MNEs’ locational behaviour is influenced by (i) informational externalities, giving rise to...

We investigate and compare the spatial distribution of manufacturing activity and its determinants in Belgium, Ireland and Portugal using comparable, exhaustive micro-level data sets. We find some similarities between Portugal and Belgium, but little for Ireland. Moreover, there is some evidence...

Economic research on industry location and agglomeration has focused nearly exclusively on manufacturing. This paper shows that services are prominent among the most agglomerated industries, especially at the county level. Because traditional measures of knowledge spillovers, natural resource...