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...

This paper focuses on the functional specialisation of a system of cities, with particular attention to the role and the formation process of secondary business centers. At the European level, the latters can be identified in the large number of regional capitals, and properly defined as cities...

This paper studies the spatial structure of firms, both theoretically and empirically. Two new facts in Danish register data motivate the analysis. First, firms have become more fragmented over time. Second, headquarters (HQ) establishments have become more manager intensive, despite a...

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...

Why are some cities specialised and others diversified? What are the advantages and disadvantages of urban specialisation and diversity? To what extent does the structure of cities, and the activities of firms and people in them, change over time? How does the sectoral composition of cities...

In Hotelling style duopoly location games the product variety (or firm locations) is typically not socially optimal. This occurs because the competitive outcome is driven by the density of consumers at the margin while the socially optimal outcome depends on the whole distribution of consumer...

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...

An important literature has made a fundamental link between corporate governance and corporate strategy. According to agency theory, assigning managers stock options aligns their interests with the interests of the owners of the firm. This paper suggests that this may not apply in the context of...

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...

Following the model-based approach of Ellison and Glaeser (1997), we develop a framework to test for the link between concentration, spatial clustering and the size of plants. Concentration is an a-spatial concept of variability that can be measured with the standard locational Gini or the more...