Disputes over national product standards are a major source of tension in international trade negotiations. The usual pattern is that exporters challenge new product standards as a `disguised barrier to trade.' The paper develops a two-country political agency model of standard setting. It is...

A key prediction of a large class of theoretical models is that the location of economic activity is not necessarily determined by fundamentals. To test the empirical relevance of these ideas requires a natural experiment in which a large but ultimately temporary shock dislocates economic...

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...

This paper evaluates the impact of relocations of public employment across cities on private sector activity. To identify the effect of changes in public employment on the private sector, we exploit the relocation of the German Federal Government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second...

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...

Trade disputes over national product standards are a growing source of tension in the international trading system. The usual pattern is that a country introduces a new product standard for all sales of a good in its local market, which is justified as necessary for consumer or environmental...