The accumulation of decent housing matters both because of the difference it makes to living standards and because of its centrality to economic development. The consequences for living standards are far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility, decent housing improves health and...

This paper argues that cumulative causation processes are fundamental to understanding growth and development. Such processes derive from spatially concentrated increasing returns to scale including thick market effects, knowledge spillovers, sectoral and urban clustering, and self-reinforcing...

Small transaction costs and uncertainty imply that optimal cross-currency interest rate speculation is marked by a first-order hysteresis band. Consequently uncovered interest parity does not hold and market efficiency tests based on it are misspecified. Indeed measured prediction errors are a...

This paper reviews and reassesses the methodology and principal findings of the quot;Rose effect,quot; i.e., the trade effects of currency union, looking at both EMU and non-EMU currency unions. The consensus estimate suggests that the euro has already boosted intra-euro area trade by five to...

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are...