We develop a model with two asymmetric countries. Firms choose the number and the location of plants that they operate. The production of each firm increases when trade costs fall. The fall also induces multinationals to repatriate their production into a single country, which is likely to be...

This paper studies the geography of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) from subnational regions, specifically California and the rest of the United States. The use of multiple source regions, as opposed to one source, provides more variation in the analysis. At the same time, subnational...

According to Albert O. Hirschman's famous dichotomy, citizens can express their preferences with their “voice” (by voting with ballots to elect better representatives) and “exit” (by voting with their feet to choose better places to live). Suppose, however, that ballot-voting is...

While the effects of non-geographic aggregation on inference are well studied in economics, research on geographic aggregation is rather scarce. This knowledge gap together with the use of aggregated spatial units in previous firm location studies result in a lack of understanding of firm...

Theory predicts intense price competition when firms cluster with rivals. Yet, strong evidence of clustering is found in previous empirical research. Researchers typically measure clustering by comparing observed location patterns to random assignment. The random assignment benchmark does not,...

We examine the causal effect of neighborhood segregation on black entrepreneurship. We address neighborhood sorting by analyzing city averages and omitted variable bias by instrumenting for segregation using historical railroad configurations. We find that segregation has a significant positive...

In the past decades, gentrification has transformed American central city neighborhoods. In this paper, I estimate a spatial equilibrium model to show that the rising value of high-skilled workers' time contributes to the gentrification of American central cities. I show that the increasing...

Economic geography equilibria that represent spontaneous agglomeration in a featureless underlying geographic space have been solved only numerically, and the resulting spatial configurations were symmetric. This paper introduces a method of obtaining analytic solutions to similar models. In the...

We use longitudinal microdata to estimate the urban density premium for U.S. establishments, controlling for observed establishment characteristics and dynamic establishment behavior. Consistent with previous studies, we estimate a density premium between 6 and 10 percent, even after controlling...

This paper contributes to the emerging literature investigating agglomeration externalities in developing countries. It is the first paper to estimate how agglomeration externality generation and reception varies for formal and informal firms by source. Using establishment level data, we find...