Modeling a micro-structure of agglomeration economies, this article derives a second-best benefit evaluation formula for urban transportation improvements. Without explicitly modeling the sources of agglomeration economies, Venables (JTEP 2007) investigated the same problem. This article...

The spatial agglomeration of economic activities play a crucial role on productivity but the composition of such an agglomeration is what really matters. There exists an ongoing debate between the predominance of the effects of agglomeration from specialization and diversity. This paper aims to...

The recent history of Europe is characterized by a dual picture showing the Old and New countries in sharp contrast with respect to their industrial specialisation and economic performance. We aim at analyzing the intertwined performance of regions and industries in New and Old European...

Empirical research on agglomeration and regional economic growth puts high emphasis on the impact of specialization, diversity, and competition on regional employment dynamics (Glaeser et al. 1992, Henderson et al. 1995, Blien et al. 2006, Fuchs 2009). However, Beugelsdijk (2006) and Raspe/van...

The paper asks whether subsidies aiming to redistribute economic activity across regions can be justified with the welfare argument. Moreover, different tax systems are compared with respect to the size of the subsidy needed for achieving a certain spatial distribution of economic activity, and...

Regional labor markets are characterized by huge disparities of unemployment rates. Models of the New Economic Geography explain how disparities of regional goods markets endogenously arise but usually assume full employment. This paper discusses regional unemployment disparities by introducing...

New economic geography focuses on the impact of falling transport costs on the spatial distribution of activities. However, it disregards the role of technological innovations, which are central to modern economic growth, as well as the role of migration costs, which are a strong impediment to...

Standard approaches to studying industrial agglomeration have been in terms of scalar measures of agglomeration within each industry. But such measures often fail to distinguish spatial scales of agglomeration. In a previous paper, Mori and Smith (2014) proposed a pair of quantitative measures...

This paper demonstrates that a pollution tax with a fixed cost component may lead, by itself, to segregation between clean and dirty firms without heterogeneous preferences or increasing returns. We construct a simple model with two locations and two industries (clean and dirty) where pollution...

Recently, there has been wide interest in the "economics" of population aging. Demographic change has crucial consequences for economic behavior; it e.g. implies that consumption and investment decisions vary over the life-cycle. The latter has important implications for economic growth, whereas...