This paper develops a computable spatial equilibrium model of Central Asia and uses it to analyze the possible effects of the Belt Road Initiative on the economy of the region. The model captures international and subnational economic units and their connectivity to each other and the rest of...

Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial...

This paper estimates the impacts of road improvements on local employment and specialization in Mexico for 1986-2014, through changes in access to domestic markets and travel costs to ports and the U.S. border. Instrumenting for road placement endogeneity and addressing the recursion problem in...

The geometry of the line and the circle has been used in economics for a long time to understand location choice and political positioning in democratic polity. This paper draws on some elementary ideas from geometry and game theory to extend some of the analysis to beyond lines and circles, to...