In many cases fjords cause disconnections in the road network, calling for the service of ferries. The construction of bridges or subsea tunnels may, however, substitute the ferries, often financed by toll charges. In this paper we use data on commuting flows from a Norwegian region with a high...

The paper describes a spatial economic agent-based model (ABM), consistent with the principles of new economic geography (NEG), which allows the discrete-time evolutionary simulation of complex interactions of household and firm location choices. In contrast with the current ABM approaches, it...

Regional labor markets are characterized by huge disparities of unemployment rates. Models of the New Economic Geography explain how disparities of regional goods markets endogenously arise but usually assume full employment. This paper discusses regional unemployment disparities by introducing...

In the United States, regions with more human capital tend to attract skilled workers (e.g., see Glaeser and Berry, 2005), and as a result, convergence between regions does not occur (e.g., see Barro and Sala-i-Martin, 1992). Presently, many of the most productive European workers try to migrate...

City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across many countries. One popular explanation for such power-law regularities is in terms of random growth processes, where power laws arise asymptotically from the assumption of iid growth rates among all cities within a...

In recent times, there has been a renewed interest in cluster policies for supporting industrial and regional development. Prominent economics like Porter and Krugman emphasise the role of clusters in regional competition and show in which way clusters can positively affect competition by...

This paper explores the problems associated with the location choice of newly created establishments at the aggregate level. Much work has been done in this domain, however, several issues arise when analyzing involved phenomena, which scholars have yet to fully explore: 1) addressing the excess...

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...

Germany like many other European countries subsidize commuting by granting the right to deduct commuting expenses from the income tax base. This regulation has often been changed and has regularly been under debate during the last decades. The pros (e.g. causing efficiency gains with respect to...

This paper claims that distance alone is a poor proxy for international transport costs in gravity equations. We develop a theoretical framework with a manufacturing and a transport sector, where the level of manufacturing exports determines the demand for transport. Above a certain threshold,...