This paper analyzes the effect of agglomeration economies on firms' total factor productivity. We propose the use of a control function approach to overcome the econometric issue inherent to the two-stage approach commonly used in the literature. Estimations are conducted separately for four...

Throughout the imperial era, defensive walls surrounded Chinese cities. Although most city walls have vanished, the cities have survived. We analyze a sample of nearly 300 prefectural-level cities in China, among which about half historically had city walls. We document that cities that had...

The East-West gap in the German population is believed to originate from migrants escaping the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We use newly collected regional data and the combination of a regression discontinuity design in space with a difference-in-differences...

In Deutschland bestehen regional große Unterschiede. Neben dem Ost-West-Gefälle ist auch ein Nord-Süd-Gefälle zu beobachten. Das Grundgesetz fordert von der Politik, gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse herzustellen. Im Koalitionsvertrag für die 19. Legislaturperiode wird dieses Ziel sowie die...

We derive a measure of the relatedness between economic activities based on weighted correlations of local employment shares, and use this measure to estimate city and activity complexity. Our approach extends discrete measures used in previous studies by recognising the extent of activities'...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

The Black Death killed 40% of Europe’s population between 1347-1352, making it one of the largest shocks in the history of mankind. Despite its historical importance, little is known about its spatial effects and the effects of pandemics more generally. Using a novel dataset that provides...

About 30 years after German reunification a persistent gap in different firm performance measures exists between East and West Germany. In this paper I focus on the differences in new German manufacturing plants' location choices across the German district-free cities and districts and...

Transport costs are a crucial element of any spatial economic model. Surprisingly, good transport cost estimates at a detailed spatial level for the EU are not readily available. In this paper we address this issue by estimating a novel dataset of road freight transport costs for goods for the...

This paper analyzes the effect of agglomeration economies on firms' total factor productivity. We propose the use of a control function approach to overcome the econometric issue inherent to the two-stage approach commonly used in the literature. Estimations are conducted separately for four...