"Urban proximity can reduce the costs of shipping goods and speed the flow of ideas. Improvements in communication technology might erode these advantages and allow people and firms to decentralize. However, improvements in transportation and communication technology can also increase the...

Product-level data on bilateral U.S. exports exhibit two strong patterns. First, most potential export flows are not present, and the incidence of these "export zeros" is strongly correlated with distance and importing country size. Second, export unit values are positively related to distance....

This paper examines shareholder wealth effects of cross-border acquisitions. In a sample 155 large acquisitions by German corporations from 19852006 international transactions total do not lead to significant announcement returns. Geography, however, makes a difference: Shareholders of acquiring...

Schelling (1969, 1971a,b, 1978) considered a simple proximity model of segregation where individual agents only care about the types of people living in their own local geographical neighborhood, the spatial structure being represented by one- or two-dimensional lattices. In this paper, we argue...

Urban proximity can reduce the costs of shipping goods and speed the flow of ideas. Improvements in communication technology might erode these advantages and allow people and firms to decentralize. However, improvements in transportation and communication technology can also increase the returns...

The United States Supreme Court has long recognized compactness as an important principle in assessing the constitutionality of political districting plans. We propose a measure of compactness based on the distance between voters within the same district relative to the minimum distance...