This paper presents a simple framework in which the location and the growth rate of economic activities are endogenous and interact. We show that the nature of the equilibrium and of the relation between growth and location depends fundamentally on whether capital is assumed to be mobile (in...

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world. Even in a struggling, medium sized city, like Birmingham, costs are more than 40 percent higher than in Manhattan although construction costs half as much. Taken together with research showing a significant negative net welfare effect...

How important are agglomeration economies for the location of foreign manufacturing plants? We investigate this question by combining innovations from previous studies and by taking advantage of a quasi-experimental setting: the political and economic transition in Romania. The recent, sudden...

Agglomeration economies and the location of foreign direct investment: empirical evidence from Romania, Regional Studies. The large inflow of foreign direct investment into Romania, after the revolution in 1989, is exploited to study the determinants of foreign direct investment location in...

This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that the positive link between homeownership and individual social capital...

This paper examines the role of local housing market conditions for social capital accumulation and neighborhood club good provision. A model of individual investment decisions predicts that in a setting with high property transaction costs (i) homeowners are more likely to invest in social...

African Americans in the United States are considerably less likely to own their homes compared to Whites. Differences in household income and other socio-economic and demographic characteristics can only partially explain this gap and previous studies suggest that the ‘unexplained’ gap has...

Relatively little is known about the determinants of FDI location in transition economies. We exploit the large inflow of FDI into Romania, after the revolution in 1989, to study this question. Using a conditional logit setup, we find that external economies from service agglomeration are the...

Office space in Britain is the most expensive in the world and regulatory constraints are the obvious explanation. We estimate the ‘regulatory tax’ for 14 British office locations from 1961 to 2005. These are orders of magnitude greater than estimates for Manhattan condominiums or office...

This paper takes a new look at the issue of overseas sourcing of services. In framework in which comparative advantage is endogenous to agglomeration economies and factor mobility, the fragmentation of production made possible by the new communication technologies and low transportation costs...