My dissertation consists of four papers embedded within the Economic Geography field. The first paper analyzes economic growth and convergence from a time series perspective focusing on regional labor markets. The second paper uses microdata to evaluate what is termed conditional sigma...

The traditional approach to estimate spatial models bases on a preconceived spatial weights matrix to measure spatial interaction among locations. The a priori assumptions used to define this matrix are supposed to be in line with the "true" spatial relationships among the locations of the...

The aim of this study is to examine the determinants of international banking. In doing so, it utilizes data from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). In particular, the primal variable of interest is drawn from BIS Consolidated Statistics and refers to banks' foreign claims. is defined...

A wide urban-rural disparity is observed in employment growth in the United States. For example, employment growth averaged 2.1 percent in urban counties during 1998-2007, compared with just 1 percent in rural counties. In this study, we examine the sources of U.S. employment growth using the...

The well-known rise in the geographical concentration of hog production suggests the presence of agglomeration economies related to spatial spillovers and inter-dependencies among industries. In this paper, we examine whether manure management regulation restricting manure application per acre...

This paper use spatial econometric models to test for racial preferences in a small urban housing market. Identifying racial preferences is difficult when unobserved neighborhood amenities vary systematically with racial composition. We adopt three strategies to redress this problem: (1) we...