We develop a frictional labor market model with multiple regions and heterogeneous firms to study how frictions impeding labor mobility across space affect the joint allocation of labor across firms and regions. Bringing the model to matched employer-employee data from Germany, we find that...

COVID-19 has been a tragedy for California. More than 4 million Californians have contracted the disease, and over 64,000 have died from it. And beyond the cost of illness and death, the pandemic and the state’s actions to contain it have devastated California’s economy. Low-income and...

The city of Shenzhen has been labeled as China's Silicon Valley. On August 18, 2019, Chinese authorities released a policy document stating that China will make Shenzhen a model city for others to follow. After an extensive literature review on relevant topics, including economic development,...

This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which granular data on economic activity are scarce. To demonstrate...

Structural transformation and regional convergence in U.S. income have been long-standing trends. Caselli and Coleman (2001) discovered that 60% of regional convergence between the U.S. South and North from 1940 to 1990 is due to structural transformation. Our replication confirms these robust...

Addressing unemployment and income inequalities in transport and land-use policies is important, particularly in South Africa, which is currently experiencing one of the highest unemployment rates and income inequality in the world. This research investigates the horizontal (geographical...

Albert Hirschman’s unbalanced growth hypothesis suggests that a developing economy can promote economic growth by initially investing in industries with high backward and forward linkages. In the case of Chinese economic policy today, one application would be the continued presence of the...

In recent years, cities have become increasingly interested in their ability to generate, attract and retain human capital. One measure of human capital is employment in science and engineering-based occupations. This paper provides a comparison of the employment shares of these specialized...

Innovative firms often engage in knowledge interactions across regional boundaries, which is difficult to account for by territorial innovation models. The territorial knowledge dynamics perspective directs attention to the ways in which firms and other actors combine regional and extra-regional...

This guide gives tips on how to do (quantitative) research and on how to write it up. These insights seem to hold throughout all (social) sciences. I illustrate them using examples from finance and economics. My main goal is to save budding researchers time by preventing them from doing bad...