Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

We analyze the distribution of economic activity across space for different types of activity and different levels of aggregation. Not only is this distribution highly uneven (independently of the type of activity and level of aggregation), it is also remarkably regular regarding its size...

This paper documents the influence of diaspora networks of high-skilled individuals - i.e., inventors - on international technological collaborations. By means of gravity models, it studies the determinants of the internationalization of inventive activity between a group of industrialized...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

Evidence indicates that house prices have become somewhat more synchronized during this century, likely reflecting more correlated movements in long-term interest rates and macroeconomic cycles that are related to trends in globalization and international portfolio diversification. Nevertheless,...

Tokyo and Seoul, the two leading East Asian global cities, operate under "developmental states." They often struggle for control over major urban initiatives against their strong state government agencies as they seek prominence in the global city hierarchy. Through comparative review of...

American agricultural law's environmental record is a legacy of legislative failure. Most of the blame can and should be attributed to the failure of the law to separate ecological objectives from competing and ultimately contradictory economic objectives. Two strains of agroecological fallacies...

In this paper, we use a panel approach to study population growth in primate cities around the world. We find that primate cities grow faster in relatively backward economies, and in more volatile and faster growing economies. We also find that the effects of trade policy on the growth of...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...

We survey the theories of why banks promise to pay par on demand and examine evidence about the conditions under which banks have promised to pay the par value of deposits and banknotes on demand when holding only fractional reserves. The theoretical literature can be broadly divided into four...