i. This discussion paper is a completely revised version of SERCDP0047, published April 2010. This paper argues that agglomeration externalities are important even in the rural periphery. The analysis focuses on the forced relocation of more than a tenth of the Finnish population after World War...

Should constraints on urban expansion be relaxed because of external agglomeration economies? In a system of heterogeneous cities, we demonstrate that second-best land use policy consists of a tax on city creation and a subsidy (tax) on urban development in cities in which the marginal-average...

Explaining the growth and change of regions and cities is one of the great challenges for social science. The field of economic geography and associated economics has developed frameworks in recent years that, while tackling major questions in spatial economic development, are deficient in their...

Research on entrepreneurship often uses information on self-employment to proxy for business creation and innovative behaviour. However, little evidence has been collected on the link between these measures. In this paper, we use data from the UK Labour Force Survey (LFS) combined with data from...

The striking geographical concentration of economic activities suggests that there are substantial benefits to agglomeration. However, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. In this paper we take advantage of a new dataset to quantify the role of one of the main contenders - the matching...

This paper aims at assessing the role of market linkages in shaping the spatial distribution of earnings. Using a space-time panel data on Italian provinces, I structurally estimate a NEG model in order to both test the coherence of theory with data, as well as to give a measure of the extent of...

This paper analyses how the degree of regional integration affects regional differences in production structures and income levels. With high transport costs, industry is spead across regions to meet final consumer demad. As transport costs fall, increasing returns interacting with labour...

We show in the framework of a new economic geography model that when labor is heterogenous and productivity depends on the quality of the match between job and worker, trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-industry trade. The agglomeration force is the improvement...

Empirical studies consistently report that labour productivity and TFP rise with city size. The reason is that cities attract the most productive agents, select the best of them, and make the selected ones even more productive via various agglomeration economies. This paper provides a...

This paper considers the location effects of geographically discriminatory trade policy. A preferential move towards a customs union pulls industry into the integrating countries. When internal barriers fall below some critical level, input-output links between imperfectly competitive firms lead...