While most empirical studies document that cognitive and social skills are strong predictors of individual earnings, their impact is not homogenous in space. We argue that dense urban settings utilize cognitive and social skills more intensively than rural areas, therefore the labour market...

This paper analyzes human capital externalities from high-skilled workers by applying functional regression to precise geocoded register data. Functional regression enables us to describe the concentration of high-skilled workers around workplaces as continuous curves and to efficiently estimate...

During the last few decades, aggregate wage growth has been very unevenly distributed across space in Germany. While wages in Southern German local labor markets rose by up to 28 log points, they increased only modestly or even declined in the north. Similar results apply to employment changes....

In this paper, I examine the influence of natural geographic features on the location of production in Germany. In particular, I quantify how much of the geographic pattern of GDP can be attributed to natural features such as resource endowments and location ('geography'). At most, ~36% of GDP's...

We provide empirical evidence of the dynamics of city size distribution for the whole of the twentieth century in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. We focus our analysis on the new cities that were created during the period of analysis. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is the...

Where does adaptation to innovation take place? The author presents evidence on the role of agglomeration economies in the application of new knowledge to production. All else equal, workers are more likely to be observed in new work in locations that are initially dense in both college...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that the density of local economic activity - measured as the number of employees per square kilometer - positively affects local average productivity. In this paper we use British data from the European Community Household Panel to ask whether local density...

This paper substantiates the debate following Richard Florida’s suggestion to measure regional human capital by creative occupations rather than education. Consistent with Florida’s notion of creativity, it suggests a microfoundation that relates creativity to workers’ cognitive and...

The paper consider the skill-biased "share-altering" technical change hypothesis in a spatial general equilibrium model where skilled and unskilled individual may exhibit different preferences for local amenities. A main novelty - both for labour and urban economics- is that, under this...