This paper focuses on two distint facets of globalization: the decrease in the trade costs of goods and the decline of communication costs between headquarters and production facilities within firms. When the unskilled have about the same wage in the two regions, the decrease of these costs...

We investigate an economic geography model in which agricultural goods are costly to transport and in which manufactures hire labor from the local agricultural sector as unskilled labor. We show that agricultural transport costs and local-unskilled labor requirements in firms act as a dispersion...

In a recent study, Holmes and Stevens (2002) identify for the first time a positive relationship that exists between establishment scale and local industry concentration using a large cross-sectional plant level data set for the US. Using an exhaustive plant level panel data set for Irish...

In this paper we build a quality-augmented version of an economic geography model where consumers have heterogenous tastes for a set of manufacturing varieties. We discuss a footloose capital model and a footloose entrepreneur model. We show that firms selling the goods with higher values select...

Revenue sharing can be used to discourage low tax regions from competing for capital and firms with high tax regions. However, with heterogeneous regions, revenue sharing involves net transfers across regions and creates a 'moral-hazard' problem that is, regions may want to invest less in market...

In the first part of this paper we prove that the global quadratic optimization problem over a simplex can be solved with a constant relative accuracy. In the second part we consider some natural extensions of the result.

We present a convex conic relaxation for a problem of maximising an indefinite quadratic form over a set of convex constraints on the squared variables. We show that for all these problems we get at least 12/37 relative accuracy of the approximation. In the second part of the paper we derive the...

This paper presents a combinatorial polynomial-time algorithm for minimizing submodular set functions. The algorithm employs a scaling scheme that uses a flow in the complete directed graph on the underlying set with each arc capacity equal to the scaled parameter.

Adaptive Polar Sampling (APS) is proposed as a Markov chain Monte Carlo method for Bayesian analysis of models with ill-behaved posterior distributions. In order to sample efficiency from such a distribution, location-scale transformation and a transformation to polar coordinates are used.

In this paper the existence of unemployment is partly explaines as being the result of coordination failures. This is achieved by considering a standard general equilibrium modes and splitting the set of commodities in two groups. The first group contains commodities like gold. The prices of...