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...

Technological innovations facilitating e-commerce have well-documented effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector, but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown. By extending models of commodity tax competition to include...

Technological innovations facilitating e-commerce have well-documented effects on consumer behavior and firm organization in the retail sector, but the effects of these new transaction technologies on fiscal systems remain unknown. By extending models of commodity tax competition to include...

In this paper we build an economic geography model where firms sell product varieties with heterogenous demands. We show that firms selling the products with higher demands select to set up their plants in larger countries. Larger countries do not only get better access to more varieties but...

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...

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...