The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

We characterize the equilibrium and optimal resource allocations in a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with multiple asymmetric sectors and heterogeneous firms. We first derive general results for additively separable preferences and general productivity distributions, and...

Place-based policies had a bad reputation for decades, if they received any attention at all. This has recently changed, for two reasons. First, many countries have experienced political backlashes from rising spatial economic disparities. Populist movements received the highest support in...

We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and "the East" - China and Eastern Europe - in the period 1988 - 2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use trade...

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also differ along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of more than 10,000 American cities, we find that older cities in the...

Using comprehensive data for German establishments, we estimate plant-evel production functions to analyze if "cultural diversity" affects total factor productivity. We distinguish diversity in the establishment's workforce and in the aggregate labor force of the region where the plant is...

We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, the firm decides i) how many intermediate inputs are simultaneously combined to a final product, ii) if the...

We investigate the causal impact of equity market liberalizations on sectoral export performance across 91 countries (1980 - 1997). The increased availability of external finance has boosted trade of industries that intensively use relationship-specific inputs, and lowered exports of industries...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000 - 2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

We analyze how globalization has affected the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in Germany over the period 1978-2008. The aggregate German economy is characterized by a secular decline of manufacturing and a rise of modern service industries. This trend - also known as Petty's law - is not...