This paper focuses on two distint facets of globalization: the decrease in the trade costs of goods and the decline of communication costs between headquarters and production facilities within firms. When the unskilled have about the same wage in the two regions, the decrease of these costs...

We investigate an economic geography model in which agricultural goods are costly to transport and in which manufactures hire labor from the local agricultural sector as unskilled labor. We show that agricultural transport costs and local-unskilled labor requirements in firms act as a dispersion...

In a recent study, Holmes and Stevens (2002) identify for the first time a positive relationship that exists between establishment scale and local industry concentration using a large cross-sectional plant level data set for the US. Using an exhaustive plant level panel data set for Irish...

In this paper we build a quality-augmented version of an economic geography model where consumers have heterogenous tastes for a set of manufacturing varieties. We discuss a footloose capital model and a footloose entrepreneur model. We show that firms selling the goods with higher values select...

Revenue sharing can be used to discourage low tax regions from competing for capital and firms with high tax regions. However, with heterogeneous regions, revenue sharing involves net transfers across regions and creates a 'moral-hazard' problem that is, regions may want to invest less in market...

We study the effects of a decrease in trade costs on the spatial distribution of industry in a multi-regional economy, when a rise in the regional population of workers generates higher urban costs. We show that high and low trade costs imply that all regions involve a positive share of the...

This paper considers the racetrack economic approach, where manufacturing activities are distributed continuously. We seek constant-access equilibria and show that smooth equilibrium distributions are always unstable for almost all transport cost functions, whereas agglomeration in 1 or 2 atomic...

We consider an economic geography model of a new genre: all firms and workers are mobile and their agglomeration within a city generates rising urban costs through competition on a land market. When commuting costs are low (high), the industry tends to be agglomerated (dispersed). With two...

This paper analyses and compares the dynamics of agglomeration in Portuguese and Irish manufacturing industries between 1985 and 1998 implementing Dumais, Ellison and Glaeser (2002) methodology. Using comparable and exhaustive micro-level data sets, we find that s industries tend to be subject...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we present an alternative model of agglomeration and trade that displays the main features of the recent economic geography literature while allowing for the derivation of analytical results by means of simple algebra. Second, we show how this...