We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Zipf's and Gibrat's Laws in the context of aggregate and high-skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non-parametric analysis. The...

Over many decades, academics, policymakers and governments have been concerned with both the presence of inequalities and the impacts these can have on people when concentrated spatially in urban areas. This concern is especially related to the influence of spatial inequalities on individual...

Urbanization economies - the effects on productivity and utility created endogenously by larger cities - are a fundamental component of both the economic geography of modern societies and the perpetuation of innovation and economic growth at a national level. Cities account for vast majorities...

We propose a regional inequality-based mechanism to explain the heterogeneity in the spread of Covid-19 and test it using data from India. We argue that a core-periphery economic structure is likely to increase the spread of infection because it involves movement of goods and people across the...

This paper argues that UN military interventions are geographically biased. For every 1,000 kilometers of distance from the three Western permanent UNSC members (France, UK, US), the probability of a UN military intervention decreases by 4 percent. We are able to rule out several alternative...

We develop a model with two asymmetric countries. Firms choose the number and the location of plants that they operate. The production of each firm increases when trade costs fall. The fall also induces multinationals to repatriate their production into a single country, which is likely to be...

The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of entrepreneurship derived from matching...

I analyze whether reducing geographic distance to high-wage jobs increases access to those employment opportunities. I collect office locations and campus recruiting strategies for over 70 prestigious banking and consulting firms, from 2000 to 2013. Using an event-study framework, I find firms...

We show that grading standards for primary school exams in England have triggered an inflation of quality indicators in the national performance tables for almost two decades. The cumulative effects have resulted in significant differences in the quality signaled to parents for otherwise...

Large regional disparities in health and healthcare costs prevail in many countries, but our understanding of the underlying causes is still limited. This study shows for the case of the Netherlands that population sorting through internal migration can explain a substantial share, around 28%,...