We study the regional location decision of multinationals in Ireland since the 1970s by focusing on the role played by agglomeration economies and by a distinct change in regional policy intent on dispersing industrial activity to the more disadvantaged areas of Ireland. We find that regional...

The paper investigates how urban primacy affects economic growth across countries. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques on a cross-country panel for the years 1960—90, an increasing relationship is unearthed between urban primacy and growth. This result holds even when limiting the...

We develop a model where workers may enter self-employment or search for jobs as employees and where there is heterogeneity across workers’ managerial ability. Workers with higher skills will manage larger firms while workers with low managerial ability will run smaller firms and will be in...

We examine the distributional impact of major dams on cropland productivity in Africa. As our unit of analysis we use a scientifically based spatial breakdown of the continent that allows one to exactly define regions in terms of their upstream/downstream relationship at a highly disaggregated...

As a tool to fight long run changes in climate the European Union explicitly introduced the emission trading scheme (EU ETS) on January 1, 2005, which aimed at reducing carbon emission by 8% by 2012, and was designed to operate in two phases. Using data related to the first phase, this article...

We show that the relationship between wealth and economic losses due to natural disasters is strongly linked to disaster risk. We first build an analytical model that demonstrates how countries that face a low hazard of disasters are likely to see first increasing losses and then decreasing ones...

We estimate for the first time the impact of hurricane strikes on local economic growth rates and how this is reflected in more aggregate growth patterns. To this end we assemble a panel data set of US coastal counties' growth rates and construct a novel hurricane destruction index that is based...

We empirically estimate the impact of hurricane strikes on local crop productivity in the Caribbean region. To this end we first identify local cropland at 1km2 geographical units via Global Land Cover data. We then employ a windfield model combined with a power dissipation equation on hurricane...