This paper brings together the literature on determination of home bias in equity holdings and the portfolio balance model of exchange rates to consider whether the dollar might be affected by a change in transactions costs that alters international portfolio allocations. Our empirical findings...

We explore the relation between international financial integration and the level of entrepreneurial activity in a country. Using a unique data set of approximately 24 million firms in nearly 100 countries in 1999 and 2004, we find suggestive evidence that international financial integration has...

We develop a diagrammatic framework that can be used to study the economic linkages between regions or cities. Hitherto, such linkages have not been the primary focus of either the theoretical or empirical literatures. We show that our general framework can be used to interpret both the New...

This paper estimates individual wage equations in order to test two rival non-nested theories of economic agglomeration, namely New Economic Geography (NEG), as represented by the NEG wage equation and urban economic (UE) theory, in which wages relate to employment density. The paper makes an...

This paper discusses recent developments in the literature on local and regional innovative performance to show how an ‘integrated’ conceptual framework based on the cross-fertilization of different theories can serve as a foundation for the comparative analysis of territorial innovation...

Thomas Friedman (2005, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) argues that the expansion of trade, the internationalization of firms, the galloping process of outsourcing and the possibility of networking are creating a ‘flat...

We consider the literatures on urban systems and New Economic Geography to examine questions concerning agglomeration and how areas respond to shocks to the economic environment. We first propose a diagrammatic framework to compare the two approaches. We then use this framework to study a number...

Market size matters for exporters if firms must recover fixed costs. This paper uses the relationship between the extensive margins of exports and destination market size to evaluate whether fixed costs operate at the firm or at the product level. If fixed costs are at the firm level,...

A variety of empirical and theoretical trade papers have suggested and documented a positive impact of trade on the productivity of firms. However, there is less consensus about the underlying mechanism at work. While trade papers focus on access to export markets, other papers stress the...

This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...