This paper models the relationship between countries' distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both exports and intermediate imports, reducing the amount of value added left to...

This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than the former. First, formal models identify which assumptions are crucial in obtaining...

This paper models the relationship between countries’ distance from global economic activity, endogenous investments in education, and economic development. Firms in remote locations pay greater trade costs on both exports and intermediate imports, reducing the amount of value added left to...

This paper aims at assessing the role of market linkages in shaping the spatial distribution of earnings. Using a space-time panel data on Italian provinces, I structurally estimate a NEG model in order to both test the coherence of theory with data, as well as to give a measure of the extent of...

This paper investigates the determinants of countries’ export performance looking in particular at the role of international product market linkages. We begin with a novel decomposition of the growth in countries’ exports into the contribution from increases in external demand and from...

This paper considers the ways geographers (proper) and (geographical) economists approach the study of economic geography. It argues that there are two areas where the approach of the latter is more robust than the former. First, formal models both enforce internal consistency and allow one to...

This paper explains why capital does not flow from the North to the South - the Lucas Paradox - with a New Economic Geography model that incorporates mobile capital, immobile labour, and productively heterogeneous firms. In contrast to neoclassical theories, the results show that even a small...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. More than 70% of the variation in per capita income can be explained by the geography of access to markets and to sources...

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions...