We develop a framework that integrates natural advantage, agglomeration economies, and firm selection to explain why large cities are both more productive and more unequal than small towns. Our model highlights interesting complementarities among those factors and it matches a number of key...

Does a better cultural milieu make a city more livable for residents and improve its business environment for firms? I address this question by computing a measure of cultural specialization based on detailed occupational data for 346 U.S. metropolitan areas. I then estimate hedonic wage and...

This paper studies how a country’s export diversification varies across destination markets. It develops an extension of the Romalis (2004) model which yields two testable predictions. According to the first, exports between similarly endowed countries ("South-South" and "North-North") are...

This paper explores the effect of market access on firms' export performance and their survival on foreign markets. The data used covers all Peruvian exporting firms between 2002 and 2008, a period during which Peru was active in joining the global economy. This is done using two indices, one...

This paper explores the asymmetries in price transmission from international to local markets. We expect the presence of large intermediaries in agricultural markets to lead to a stronger price transmission when international prices decline than when they rise. The empirical evidence confirms...

In this paper a novel partitioned inversion formula is obtained in terms of the orthogonal complements of off-diagonal blocks, with the emblematic matrix of unit-root econometrics springing up as the leading diagonal block of the inverse. On the one hand, the result paves the way to a...

Any attempt to operationalise the capability approach necessitates an adequate framework for the measurement of the abstract unobservable multidimensional concept that the term human development stands for. One such attempt is the latent variable approach including principal components, factor...

We introduce Indirect Robust Generalized Method of Moments (IRGMM), a new simulation-based estimation methodology, to model short-term interest rate processes. The primary advantage of IRGMM relative to classical estimators of the continuous-time short-rate diffusion processes is that it...