What determines the distributions of skills, occupations, and industries across cities? We develop a theory to jointly address these fundamental questions about the spatial organization of economies. Our model incorporates a system of cities, their internal urban structures, and a...

Theories featuring multiple equilibria are now widespread across many fields of economics. Yet little empirical work has asked if such multiple equilibria are salient features of real economies. We examine this in the context of the Allied bombing of Japanese cities and industries in WWII. We...

How do labor markets adjust to trade liberalization? Leading models of intraindustry trade (Krugman (1981), Melitz (2003)) assume homogeneous workers and full employment, and thus predict that all workers win from trade liberalization, a conclusion at odds with the public debate. Our paper...

This paper considers tariff phase-outs in multilateral and preferential agreements. The paper finds that early GATT rounds primarily were over bindings of existing rates and that it was not until the 1962-67 Kennedy Round's 50% reduction in manufactured goods tariffs that time paths of tariff...

How does trade liberalization affect wages? This is the first paper to consider in theory and data how the impact of final and intermediate input tariff cuts on workers' wages varies with the global engagement of their firm. Our model predicts that a fall in output tariffs lowers wages at...

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories - increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Age to the modern era. We also consider the...

There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework...

We consider trade between a flexible wage America and a rigid real wage Europe. In a benchmark case, a move from autarky to free trade doubles the European unemployment rate, while it raises the American unskilled wage to the high European level. Entry of the unskilled South to world markets...

Empirical work relating trade liberalization and income distributed has iden- tified an important anomaly. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem predict trade liberalization will shift income toward a country's abundant factor. For developing countries, this suggests liberalization will principally...

The increasing returns revolution in trade is incomplete in an important respect there exists no compelling empirical demonstration of the role of increasing returns in determining production and trade structure. One reason is that trade patterns of the canonical increasing returns models are a...