North American railways were crucial to the integration of national territories from the mid-1850s through the 1920s. In the US, Canada, and Mexico, their development supported population settlement, resource extraction, industrialization, and the expansion of markets to regional and national...

The oft-observed inverse relationship between economic activity in the formal or informal sector and levels of fertility is attributed to the opportunity costs of reproduction. The economic and social policies that initiate and maintain the substantial flow of federal transfer payments to the...

Transportation and land use research of the past decade has focused in large part on the question of whether manipulating land uses in the direction of “smart growth” alternatives can reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or otherwise improve travel behavior. Yet the notion of...

This paper addresses disruptive changes that globalization imposes on the geography of innovation systems, and identifies potential benefits that developing countries could reap from international linkages. The analysis is centered on three propositions. First, developing countries need to blend...

We solve an optimal growth model in continuous space, continuous and bounded time. The optimizer chooses the optimal trajectories of capital and consumption across space and time by maximizing an objective function with both space and time discounting. We extract the corresponding Pontryagin...

This dissertation examines the key prediction of trade models à la Dixit-Stiglitz for the EU-27. Precisely, we test if regional market accessibility determines regional income differences in the enlarged European Union. We propose an empirical strategy that overcomes weaknesses of existing...

Utilizando información sobre la distribución de la población por cada kilómetro cuadrado de Europa (GEOSTAT 2011), este artículo documenta que España es el país con un mayor porcentaje de territorio deshabitado y una mayor concentración de la población en determinadas zonas...

One of the most striking features of the world economy is that wealthy countries are clustered together. This paper theoretically and empirically explains a mechanism for this clustering by extending the Acemoglu and Ventura model so that it takes real geography into account. Countries close to...