Income levels are higher in cities. The evidence for the income gap between urban and rural areas is overwhelming, but the agglomeration effect is hard to identify. Recent advances make use of individual level data to separate out sorting and instrumentation to handle the endogeneity of...

Accumulation of education and geographic concentration of educated people in cities are expected to generate urban income growth. New economic geography predicts income divergence across regions. We investigate the dynamic process of accumulating tertiary education and regional income growth in...

International trade may influence income distribution. This study takes as a starting point the puzzling development of relative wages between skilled and unskilled labor in South Africa. Wage inequality decreased during the sanctions period and increased with trade liberalization post...

Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

Thailand has experienced annual average growth of GDP of remarkable 6.6% during the period 1950 – 2000. We analyze total factor productivity (TFP) growth in a modified Nelson-Phelps framework where foreign trade and foreign direct investment influence the adoption of technology. The...

Cost control in the public sector is a challenge for political institutions. Theoretical research recently has shown incentive effects of property taxation that can work as a mechanism to hold costs down. We are able to investigate the empirical relevance of this proposition, since local...

The paper investigates the relationships between costs and user charges in the sewage industry in Norwegian local governments. The purpose of the analysis is to answer the following questions: (i) To what extent is a higher unit cost passed on to consumers in terms of a higher user charge? (ii)...

The mobility of the tax base may influence fiscal outcomes. The many theoretical contributions about the role of mobility are not matched by empirical evidence. Existing studies address strategic interaction between governments, but have little to say about mobility. We introduce a new measure...

The analysis of the effect of tariffs for labor productivity faces the challenge of tariff policy endogeneity. Tariff policy is designed to promote economic development and the industrial sector tariff structure may reflect characteristics of the industries protected. We seek to identify the...