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...

The information contained in PP-plots is transformed into a single number. The resulting Harmonic Mass (HM) index is distribution free and its sample counterpart is shown to be consistent. For a wide class of CDFs the exact analytical expression of the distribution of the sample HM index is...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

We analyze the impact of obsolescence of economic inventions by incorporating maintenance costsin the endogenous growth model of expanding product varieties. This contrasts with the existingliterature, which ignores maintenance costs and uses the model of quality improvements todescribe...

Using a rich data set on the EU regions, we analyze the relevance of two possible determinants of a region's resilience to shocks, the degree of urbanization and specialization. We take the Great Recession, the economic and financial crisis that started in 2008, as our shock and then analyze how...