We examine firm responses to location-based hiring subsidies. We leverage institutional features of the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), a large-scale business incentive program that incorporates best practices from prior job creation policies. The CCTC award selection procedure combines...

Competition among state and local governments to lure businesses has attracted considerable interest from economists, as well as legislators and policy makers. This paper quantifies the role of plant relocations in the geographic redistribution of manufacturing employment and examines the...

In this paper, I present a framework for analyzing city competition that clarifies the different dimensions along which cities can compete with one another for people and firms. I contend that current urban development strategies are largely based on a “hydraulic” approach to development and...

Oates' (1972) decentralization theorem holds that local governments will do a superior job at providing the efficient quantity of public goods. Brennan and Buchanan (1980) suggest that "the potential for fiscal exploitation varies inversely with the number of competing governmental units in the...

Die regionale Wirtschaftskraft der 402 Kreise Deutschlands, gemessen an ihrer Bruttowertschöpfung pro Kopf, ist 2014 deutlich gleicher als 2000 verteilt. Das gilt auch für die 1 300 Regionen der EU – wobei allerdings innerhalb der alten EU-15-Staaten ein Anstieg der regionalen Ungleichheit...

We study the role of land development restrictions for the effects of highway expansion on the spatial distribution of population. We demonstrate that these restrictions strongly interfered with the effects of highways in the Netherlands. Introducing an IV approach to address endogenous...

Empirical results on the link between growth and diversity in (un)related industries proved to be highly dependent on the specific regional and temporal context. Making use of highly disaggregated employment data at the sub-regional level, we find that higher employment growth in Austria is...

I show that the nontradable sector of a regional economy benefits from attracting jobs in the tradable sector. I find that on average one new job in a tradable industry in a city will attract 1.02 extra jobs in the nontradable sector of that same city. This local multiplier effect increases with...

This paper attempts to explain two basic facts of segregation in the United States in recent decades. The segregation of blacks remains everywhere higher than the segregation of Latinos and Asians, but the levels are converging. Previous research stresses things like urban form and racial...