The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

The division of labor between and within countries is driven by two fundamental forces, comparative advantage and increasing returns. We set up a simple Ricardian model with a Marshallian input sharing mechanism to study their interplay. The key insight that emerges is that the interaction...

The paper asks whether subsidies aiming to redistribute economic activity across regions can be justified with the welfare argument. Moreover, different tax systems are compared with respect to the size of the subsidy needed for achieving a certain spatial distribution of economic activity, and...

The global welfare implications of home market effects in trade models with imperfect competition are little understood. This paper proposes a simple model in which such implications can be easily analyzed. It shows an overall tendency of imperfectly competitive sectors to inefficiently cluster...

The paper will review representations of regional development models in terms of their assumptions (peeled away like an onion) and in terms of their level of complexity, very much in the tradition of Peter Allen's classification system. Some applied models of regional economic development in...

The comparative advantage of many cities is based on their efficiency in the production of "functions", e.g., business services such as finance, law, engineering, or similar functions that are used by firms in a wide range of sectors. Firms that use these functions may choose to source them...

This paper investigates the joint impact of Chamberlinian monopolistic competition and Ricardian comparative advantages on the structure of trade and industries. We develop a trade model with several industries employing local factors. We then investigate the structure of trade and industries as...

In this paper we want to shed some light on the empirical relevance of the new economic geography. Using one of the central features of the core new economic geography models, namely that wages have the tendency to fall the further one moves away from centres of economic activity, we investigate...

This paper presents a simple, analytically solvable Chamberlinian agglomeration model. As in the canonical core-periphery (CP) model, two agglomerative forces are at work. However, the present model exhibits a 'pitchfork bifurcation' rather than the 'tomahawk bifurcation' of the CP model.