In contrast to what several papers have argued recently, we show that firm heterogeneity fosters agglomeration of economic activity. If firms are more similar with respect to their total factor productivity, each company faces a lower propensity to export. This renders the home market more...

This paper analyzes the impact of public input competition in a New Economic Geography framework. It is shown that regional competition yields an overprovision of public inputs if trade costs are sizable while it leads to underprovision if regions are highly integrated. Moreover, public input...

This paper is concerned with the urban wage premium and addresses two central issues about which the field has not yet reached a consensus: first, the extent to which sorting of high ability individuals into urban areas explains the urban wage premium and second, whether workers receive this...

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus changes in residential land per household. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.7% while population...