During times of major technological change leading cities are often overtaken by upstart metropolitan areas. Such upheavals may be explained if the advantage of established urban centers rests on localized learning-by-doing. When a new technology for which this accumulated experience is...

Recent models in economic geography suggest that there may be very large numbers of equilibrium spatial structures. Simulations suggest, however, that the structures that emerge are surprisingly orderly, and often seem approximately to follow simple rules about the spacing of urban sites. This...

Many of the world's largest cities are now in developing countries. We develop a simple theoretical model, inspired by the case of Mexico, that explains the existence of such giant cities as a consequence of the strong forward and backward linkages that arise when manufacturing tries to serve a...

It is widely believed that U.S. trade deficits have displaced workers from highly paid manufacturing jobs into less well-paid service employment, contributing to declining incomes for the nation as a whole. Although proponents of this view do not usually think of it this way, this analysis falls...

Much recent work has suggested that endogenous technological change tends to reinforce the position of the leading nations. Yet from time to time this leadership role shifts. We suggest a mechanism that explains this pattern of -leapfrogging- as a response to occasional major changes in...

A number of recent studies appear to show that international trade is a secondary factor in the growing inequality of wages, with technology probably the main culprit. These studies have, however, been subjected to severe and in some cases harshly worded criticism by trade theorists, who argue...

This paper develops models of spatial equilibrium in which a central metropolis emerges to supply manufactured goods to an agricultural hinterland. The location of the metropolis is not fully determined by the location of resources: as long as it is not too far from the geographical center of...

This paper presents a theoretical basis fcr the srgunent that large exchange rate shocks - such as the rise of the dollar from 1980 to 1985 - may shift historical relationships between exchange rates and trade flows. We begin with partial models in which large exchange rate fluctuations lead to...

It has been widely remarked that US import prices have not fully reflected movements in the exchange rate. This paper begins with an investigation of the actual extent of "pricing to market" by foreign suppliers. It shows that pricing to market is a real phenomenon, but not universal; in...

The postwar expansion of trade among the industrial countries has not had the strong distributional effects which standard models of trade would have led us to expect. This paper develops a model which attempts to explain this observation, while at the same time making sense of some other...