The paper examines the interactions between economic integration and population agglomeration in a middle product economy displaying neoclassical growth. There are two vertically integrated economies. Each consists of a large number of final good competitive firms operating plants in both...

Consider a model à la Koopmans-Beckmann involving two indivisible and interactive firms, as well as a continuum of workers. Firm 1 uses labor, while firm 2 uses labor and good 1 produced by firm 1; both goods 1 and 2 can be exported their output but good 1 cannot be imported. The land...

This paper aims at contributing to the description of the choice behavior of an individual who is unable to deal with a large number of alternatives and is unsure about his most preferred alternative in any given choice subset. Hence, there is a conflict in that the individual wants to reduce...

The most salient feature of the spatial economy is the presence of a large variety of economic agglomerations. Our purpose is to review some of the main explanations of this universal phenomenon, as they are proposed in urban economics and modern economic geography. We first show why the...

Market size and transport costs are important ingredients of international trade. We propose to look at these issues from a different perspective. Using a Hotelling duopoly model with quadratic transport costs, we analyze the welfare effects of international trade between two countries which...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first one, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution...

A new approach is proposed to explain the formation of secondary employment centers in a monocentric city. Specifically, a large firm considers locating a new plant in a city where none of the existing businesses has a significative share of the labor force, so that its location can be viewed as...

We investigate how differences in set-up costs of various types affect the trade-off between global effciency and spatial equity and show that the standard assumption of symmetry in fixed costs masks the existence of an interesting effect: the range of available varieties varies depends on the...