We develop an economic geography model where mobile skilled workers choose to either work in a production sector or to become part of an unproductive elite. The elite sets income tax rates to maximize its own welfare by extracting rents, thereby influencing the spatial structure of the economy...

We study the impact of falling trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Two regions between which labour is mobile form each country, but there is no international factor mobility. Commodities can be traded both...

The aim of this paper is to qualify the claim that regulating a competitive transport sector is always detrimental to consumers. We show indeed that, although transport deregulation is beneficial to consumers as long as the location of economic activity is fixed, this is no longer true when, in...

We propose a theory-based approach to testing the presence of the 'home market effect' in a multi-country world. Our framework extends Krugman's (1980, Am. Econ. Rev. 70(5), 950-959) model, in which the appeal of a country as a production site depends on both the relative size of its domestic...

We extend the two-country model by Krugman (1980) to a multi-country set-up and show that the `home-market effect' highlighted with two countries does not readily extend to such a more general setting. In particular, we prove that the most important result, namely the disproportionate causation...

We distill the main insights from recent trade models on firms' responses to globalisation. Our primary aim is to assess the economic impact and the welfare implications of the resulting reallocation of resources across firms and countries. In so doing, we bring theory into life through the...

We investigate how international trade and trade policy possibly affect the regional distribution of economic activities within a country involved in a process of economic integration. Our analysis reveals that the impact of decreasing international trade costs on the spatial distribution of...

We investigate the role of the transport sector in structuring the location of economic activity within two-region economic geography models of the footloose capital and core-periphery types. In our setting, competitive carriers offer transport services for shipping manufactured goods across...

We develop an economic geography model in which mobile skilled workers choose between working in the production sector or becoming part of an unproductive political elite. The elite sets tax rates on skilled and unskilled workers to maximize its own welfare by extracting rents, thereby...

We distill the main insights from recent trade models on firms responses to globalisation. Our primary aim is to assess the economic impact and the welfare implications of the resulting reallocation of resources across firms and countries. In sodoing, we bring theory into life through the...