This paper shows evidence of positive effects in the economic development of sending communitiesin Mexico due to migration. The principal hypothesis of this study is that remittances, knowledge and experience acquired by migrants during their migratory cycle, can be translated into larger...

This paper evaluates the role of regional cluster composition in the economic performance of industries, clusters and regions. On the one hand, diminishing returns to specialization in a location can result in a convergence effect: the growth rate of an industry within a region may be declining...

We examine the golden age of U.S. innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking historical U.S. patents to state and county-level aggregates and matching inventors to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940. We identify a causal relationship between patented inventions and...

Many development policies, such as placement of infrastructure or local economic development schemes, are “place-based.” Such policies are generally intended to stimulate private sector investment and economic growth in the treated place, and as such they are difficult to appraise and...

This paper tests several theories of the effects of congressional representation on state economic growth. States that were represented by very senior Democratic congressmen grew more quickly during the 1953-1990 period than states that were represented by more junior congressional delegations....

Several explanations can be offered for the unbalanced growth of U.S. regional manufacturing industries in the decades after World War II. The convergence hypothesis suggests that the success of the South in catching up to the Northeast and Midwest should be understood by analogy with the...

This paper examines the relationship between the structure of banking markets and economic growth using a new dataset on manufacturing industry-level growth rates and banking market concentration for U.S. states during 1899-1929--a period when the manufacturing sector was expanding rapidly and...

This paper estimates the effect of access to transportation networks on regional economic outcomes in China over a twenty-period of rapid income growth. It addresses the problem of the endogenous placement of networks by exploiting the fact that these networks tend to connect historical cities....

A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in levels of per capita income and product? After considering predictions of closed- and open-economy neoclassical growth theories, we...

National, state, and local policy makers have increasingly focused their attention on policies toward economic growth, especially efforts to raise the rate of investment. Recent studies of economic growth have raised a debate over the role played by the investment rate in the long-run...