Results

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Leaders in social movements: evidence from unions in Myanmar

Social movements are catalysts for crucial institutional changes. To succeed, they must coordinate members' views (consensus building) and actions (mobilization). We study union leaders within Myanmar's burgeoning labor ...Read more...

Journal article

The Energy Journal:

Natural gas vehicles: consequences for fuel markets and the environment

Policies to adopt cleaner fuels have become increasingly important, but their impacts on incumbent fuel prices and resulting greenhouse gas emissions remain unclear. We use a panel dataset on weekly prices at the gas sta...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Manipulation and selection in unemployment insurance

In this paper, we study the selection patterns of individuals who manage to have their lay-off delayed around an age at lay-off threshold entitling them to four additional months of unemployment insurance, that is, manip...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Combining financial statements with firm-level product prices, we find that larger firms exhibit lower markups, although they are overcompensated by substantially higher wage markdowns. We explain our divergence from pri...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The price of power: why rising markups hurt innovation and widen inequality

Over the past four decades, the United States has seen rising market power, slowing productivity growth and deepening wealth inequality. Giammario Impullitti and Pontus Rendahl explore how declining competition may be th...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Inequality:

Equivalence scales revisited: evidence from subjective data

Equivalence scales (ES) are widely used to compare income levels across different households. Yet the commonly used OECD and square-root scales rely on assumptions about household economies of scale that lack robust empi...Read more...

Blog

What works centre for local economic growth:

Do cities and regions gain from public sector relocation?

In this guest blog, Dr. Max Nathan, Henry Overman, Capucine Riom, and Maria Sanchez-Vidal set out evidence on the impact of BBC (partial) relocation to Salford on wider employment in the area. This blog was originally pu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market power, growth and wealth inequality

In recent decades, the United States has experienced a notable rise in markups, a slowdown in productivity growth, and an increase in wealth inequality. We present a framework that unifies these trends into a common driv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The distributional consequences of trade: evidence from the Grain Invasion

We examine the distributional consequences of trade using the New World Grain Invasion that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. We use a newly-created dataset on population, employment by sector, property va...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Immigration, female labour supply and local cultural norms

We study the local evolution of female labour supply and cultural norms in West Germany in reaction to the sudden presence of East Germans who migrated to the West after reunification. These migrants grew up with high ra...Read more...

Chapter

Income inequality before, during, and after the transition in central and eastern Europe

in The Oxford Handbook of Post-Socialist Economies

This chapter explores the income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe before, during, and after the transition. It argues that the fall of communism and the transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe were landm...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The skyscraper revolution: global economic development and land savings

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17,...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do larger firms exert more market power? Markups and markdowns along the size distribution

Several models posit a positive cross-sectional correlation between markups and firm size, which characterizes misallocation, factor shares, and gains from trade. Accounting for labor market power in markup estimation, w...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The comparative advantage of firms

Resource-based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products that use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common-input capabilities, using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Econometrics:

Surveying business uncertainty

We elicit subjective probability distributions from business executives about their own-firm outcomes at a one-year look-ahead horizon. In terms of question design, our key innovation is to let survey respondents freely ...Read more...

Journal article

Economics Letters:

Firm-destination heterogeneity and the distribution of export intensity

We derive closed-form expressions for the distribution of export intensity when firm-destination-specific revenue shifters are distributed gamma, Frechet and Weibull in a two-country model of trade with isoelastic demand...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Market size, markups and international price dispersion in the cement industry

Prices for several intermediate inputs, including cement, are higher in developing economies - particularly in Africa. Combining data from the International Comparison Program with a global directory of cement plants we ...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Household inequality and remittances in rural Thailand: a life-cycle perspective

This article studies the dynamics of income inequality among a panel of rural households in Thailand. In contrast to the many cross-section studies of income inequality, the article exploits a long panel data set to exam...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The origins of firm heterogeneity: a production network approach

We explore firm size heterogeneity in production networks. In comprehensive data for Belgium, firms with more customers have higher total sales but lower sales and lower market shares per customer. Downstream factors, es...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

The twin peaks of the export intensity distribution

Received wisdom suggests that most exporters sell most of their output domestically. We show, however, that the distribution of export intensity varies substantially across countries and is often bimodal, displaying ?twi...Read more...

Journal article

German Economic Review:

Trade and the size distribution of firms: Evidence from the German Empire

What effect did trade have on the size distribution of firms during the first wave of globalization? Three historical datasets from the German Empire between 1875 and 1907 were collected and harmonized to answer this que...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in postwar Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after ...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Local economic conditions and the nature of new housing supply

We explore the effects of local economic conditions on the type and size of newly constructed housing units in a city. Exploiting the 1984?2004 metro area samples of the American Housing Survey and US Census building per...Read more...

Journal article

The Lancet Public Health :

Policy stringency and mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic: a longitudinal analysis of data from 15 countries

To date, public health policies implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic have been evaluated on the basis of their ability to reduce transmission and minimise economic harm. We aimed to assess the association between COV...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

Parents, schools and human capital differences across countries

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least a...Read more...

CEP Covid-19 analysis

Prices and inflation in a pandemic - a micro data approach

The Covid-19 lockdowns and recession are the most exceptional economic events in living memory and will impact the economy for years to come. One vital channel is via price changes. Price rises and cuts alter real wages,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of regulation on innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data where there is a sharp ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Trapped factors and China?s impact on global growth

After a recent increase in Chinese import competition, European firms increased innovation. We present and rationalise these patterns using `trapped factors? at the micro level within a stylised equilibrium model of prod...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Are bigger banks better? Firm-level evidence from Germany

The effects of large banks on the real economy are theoretically ambiguous and politically controversial. I identify quasi-exogenous increases in bank size in post-war Germany. I show that firms did not grow faster after...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Productivity and organization in portuguese firms

Using employer-employee matched and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of productivity to firm reorganizations as measured by changes in the number of managemen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Prime locations

We harness big data to detect prime locations - large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services - in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Retail shocks and city structure

This paper evaluates the consequences of opening out-of-town big-boxes on the commercial structure of cities. I use a discontinuity in a commercial regulation in Spain that restricts the entry of big-box stores in munici...Read more...

CentrePiece article

Firm size, productivity and pay in today's service economy

The evidence that bigger firms pay higher wages and have higher productivity is based mainly on manufacturing, which is only a small share of today's economy. Giuseppe Berlingieri, Sara Calligaris and Chiara Criscuolo re...Read more...

Journal article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications:

A tale of two tails: do Power Law and Lognormal models fit firm-size distributions in the mid-Victorian era?

The paper explores the frequency and size distributions of firm-size in a novel dataset for the mid-Victorian era from a recent extraction of the England and Wales population censuses of 1851, 1861, 1871, and 1881. The p...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trainspotting: 'good jobs', training and skilled immigration

While skilled immigration ceteris paribus provides an immediate boost to GDP per capita by adding to the human capital stock of the receiving economy, might it also reduce the number of ?good jobs?, i.e. those with train...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

The economic effects of density: a synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 347 estimates of density elasticities of a broad range of outcomes ranging from wages, innovation, rents, various amenities, t...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The comparative advantage of firms

Resource based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products which use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common input capabilities using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

Spatial imaginaries and tech cities: place-branding East London's digital economy

We explore place branding as an economic development strategy for technology clusters, using London?s `Tech City? initiative as a case study. We site place branding in a larger family of policies that develop spatial ima...Read more...

Journal article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

Firming up inequality

We use a massive,matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

Monopolistic competition and optimum product diversity under firm heterogeneity

Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries and their role in resource allocation. This paper examines the allocational efficiency of such markets. Productivity dif...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The origins of firm heterogeneity: a production network approach

This paper quantifies the origins of firm size heterogeneity when firms are interconnected in a production network. Using the universe of buyer-supplier relationships in Belgium, the paper develops a set of stylized fact...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The productivity-wage premium: does size still matter in a service economy?

Ever since Moore (1911) a large empirical and theoretical literature has established the existence of a firm size-wage premium. At the same time, a second regularity in empirical work, linking size and productivity, has ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Specialization matters in the firm size-wage gap

This study applies the O-ring theory to explain the firm-size wage premium. It focuses on the joint role of the division of labor and employee characteristics. Including the firm heterogeneity of occupations in a standar...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control:

Growth volatility and size: a firm-level study

This paper provides a systematic cross-country investigation of the relation between a firm's growth volatility and its size. For the first time the analysis is carried out using comparable and representative sets of dat...Read more...

Journal article

AEA Papers and Proceedings:

The productivity-wage premium: does size still matter in a service economy?

The literature has established two robust stylized facts: (i) the existence of a firm size-wage premium and (ii) a positive relationship between firm size and productivity. However, the existing evidence is mainly based ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The effect of minimum wages on low-wage jobs: evidence from the United States using a bunching estimator

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. Using st...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Twin peaks

Received wisdom suggests that most exporters sell the majority of their output domestically. In this paper, however, we show that the distribution of export intensity not only varies substantially across countries, but i...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Compact City in Empirical Research: A Quantitative Literature Review

The `compact city? is one of the most prominent concepts to have emerged in the global urban policy debate, though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent its theorised positive outcomes can be substantiated by evide...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Is modern technology responsible for jobless recoveries?

Since the early 1990s, recoveries from recessions in the US have been plagued by weak employment growth. We investigate whether a similar problem afflicts other developed economies, and whether technology is a culprit. W...Read more...

Journal article

Economica:

Gender inequality and economic development: fertility, education and norms

We document the evolution of gender inequality in labour market outcomes?earnings, labour supply and wage rates?over the path of economic development, and present evidence on the potential reasons for this evolution. To ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

My precious! The location and diffusion of scientific research: evidence from the synchrotron Diamond Light Source

We analyse the impact of the establishment of the Diamond Light Source synchrotron, a large basic scientific research facility in the UK, on the geographic distribution of related research. To account for the potentially...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Political favoritism in China's capital markets and its effect on city sizes

This paper examines political favoritism of cites in national capital markets and the effect of that favoritism on city sizes. The paper estimates the city-by-city variation in the prices of capital across cities in Chin...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economic Effects of Density: A Synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 202 estimates of density elasticities from 102 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not be...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Urban Economics:

Spatial frictions

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We deve...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Firm size distortions and the productivity distribution: evidence from France

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the size distribution of firms: evidence from the German Empire

What is the effect of trade on the size distribution of firms? We collect historical data between 1882 and 1907 from the German Empire to address this question. Our data allow us to match three data sets according to the...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Geography of City Liveliness and Land Use Configurations: Evidence from Location-Based Big Data in Beijing

This paper explores the complexity in the connection between city liveliness and land use configurations for housing and consumption amenities. The sources of this complexity are captured by an integrated spatial and tem...Read more...

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

No one would be spared: how the costs of Brexit would be distributed across households

That leaving the EU would damage the overall economy is now being treated as more of a fact than a speculation. But those for Brexit argue that the rich will be negatively affected while the poor will benefit. This is no...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Building the City: Urban Transition and Institutional Frictions

We model the building of a city, estimate parameters of the model, and calculate welfare losses from institutional frictions encountered in changing land-use. We distinguish formal and slum construction technologies; in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unraveling firms: demand, productivity and markups heterogeneity

We develop a novel framework that simultaneously allows recovering heterogeneity in demand, quantity TFP and markups across firms while leaving the correlation between the three dimensions unrestricted. We accomplish thi...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Productivity and organization in Portuguese firms

The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firm's actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides ...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Income and population growth

Do populations grow as countries become richer? In this study we estimate the effects on population growth of shocks to national income that are plausibly exogenous and unlikely to be driven by technological change. For ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

All-star or benchwarmer? Relative age, cohort size and career success in the NHL

We analyze the performance outcomes of National Hockey League (NHL) players over 18 seasons (1990-1991 to 2007-2008) as a function of the demographic conditions into which they were born. We have three main findings. Fir...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Local Economic Conditions and the Nature of New Housing Supply

We present a modified open monocentric city model that assumes that land is available for conversion into new housing throughout the city. The model predicts that positive local income shocks (i) increase the city?s shar...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Monopolistic competition and optimum product selection

We provide novel insights on the decentralization of optimal outcomes under monopolistic competition with nonseparable utility, variable demand elasticity, and endogenous firm heterogeneity. Relative to the unconstrained...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Culturally Clustered or in the Cloud? Location of Internet Start-ups in Berlin

Knowledge based firms like IT companies do neither have a capital- nor a land intensive production. They predominantly rely on qualified labour and increasingly depend on the location of its (potential) employees. This i...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review:

Market size, competition, and the product mix of exporters

We build a theoretical model of multi-product firms that highlights how competition across market destinations affects both a firm's exported product range and product mix. We show how tougher competition in an export ma...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Here Be Startups: Exploring a young digital cluster in Inner East London

The digital industries cluster known as 'Silicon Roundabout' has been quietly growing in East London since the 1990s. Now rebranded 'Tech City', it is now the focus of huge public and government attention. National and l...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Gibrat's Law and the British Industrial Revolution

This paper examines Gibrat?s law in England and Wales between 1801 and 1911 using a unique data set covering the entire settlement size distribution. We find that Gibrat?s law broadly holds even in the face of population...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urban Escalators and Inter-regional Elevators: The Difference that Location, Mobility and Sectoral Specialisation make to Occupational Progression

This paper uses evidence from the (British) Longitudinal Study to examine the influence on occupational advancement of the city-region of residence (an escalator effect) and of relocation between city-regions (an elevato...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Urbanity

I define a composite amenity that provides aesthetic and consumption value to local residents: Urbanity. A novel data set of geo-tagged photos shared in internet communities serves as a proxy for urbanity. From the spati...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

How Far Do England?s Second-Order Cities Emulate London as Human-Capital `Escalators??

In the urban resurgence accompanying the growth of the knowledge economy, second-order cities appear to be losing out to the principal city, especially where the latter is much larger and benefits from substantially grea...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Size Distribution Across All 'Cities': A Unifying Approach

Older cities in the US tend to be larger than younger ones. The distribution of city sizes is, therefore, systematically related to the country's city age distribution. We introduce endogenous city creation into a dynami...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Self-Employment Measure Entrepreneurship? Evidence from Great Britain

Research on entrepreneurship often uses information on self-employment to proxy for business creation and innovative behaviour. However, little evidence has been collected on the link between these measures. In this pape...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Firm Size and Judicial Efficiency in Italy: Evidence from the Neighbour's Tribunal

We investigate the causal relationship between judicial efficiency and firm size across Italian municipalities, exploiting spatial discontinuities in tribunals' jurisdiction for identification. Results show that halving ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Great Britain's Second-Order City Regions in Recessions, 1978-2010

While it is now accepted that the 2008-09 recession accentuated regional differences in Britain, it is more difficult to identify the role of major cities, especially over a longer time scale. Using previously establishe...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies it to France where man...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Frictions

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We deve...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Mass Education or a Minority Well Educated Elite in the Process of Development: the Case of India

This paper analyses whether in developing countries mass education is more growth enhancing than to have a minority well educated elite. Using the Indian census data as a benchmark and enrollment rates at different level...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Simple Theory of Managerial Talent, Pay Contracts and Wage Distribution

This paper develops a simple theory of pay structures and pay levels across heterogeneous agents by bringing together optimal contracts inside the firm and competitive resource allocation in the market. The central idea ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Autoregressions in Small Samples, Priors about Observables and Initial Conditions

We propose a benchmark prior for the estimation of vector autoregressions: a prior about initial growth rates of the modelled series. We first show that the Bayesian vs frequentist small sample bias controversy is driven...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Fluctuating Record of Economic Regeneration in England's Second-Order City Regions, 1984-2007

This study examines how far and in what way `Our cities are back?, as claimed by England?s Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984-2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city regions: Birmingham, Brist...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Vulnerability of Currency Pegs: Evidence from Brazil

This paper analyses predictions of a simple model of currency crises in which the peg will be abandoned when the currency overvaluation hits a certain threshold, unknown to the agents. Due to learning about the threshold...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Private Sector Employment Growth, 1998-2004: A Panel Analysis of British Workplaces

Using nationally representative panel data for British private sector workplaces this paper points to the importance of distinguishing between workplace and firm size when analysing employment growth, and finds that the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Superstars and Renaissance Men: Specialization, Market Size and the Income Distribution

A general equilibrium model of individual specialization is presented in which agents trade off the productivity and price implications of producing a narrower range of goods. Agents with highly specific skills turn out ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Zipf's Law for Cities: A Cross Country Investigation

This paper assesses the empirical validity of Zipf?s Law for cities, using new data on 73 countries and two estimation methods ? OLS and the Hill estimator. With either estimator, we reject Zipf?s Law far more often than...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Reconciling Workless Measures at the Individual and Household Level: Theory and Evidence from the United States, Britain, Germany, Spain and Australia

Individual and household based aggregate measures of worklessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance. We outline a means of quantifying the extent of any disparity, (polarisation), in ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Threshold Effects and Firm Size: the Case of Firing Costs

We study the role of employment protection legislation (EPL) in determining firm size distribution. In many countries the provisions of EPL are more stringent for firms above certain size thresholds. We construct a simpl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Two Sides to Every Story: Measuring the Polarisation of Work

Individual and household based aggregate measures of joblessness can, and do, offer conflicting signals about labour market performance if work is unequally distributed. This paper introduces a simple set of indices that...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Scale Effects in Markets with Search

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-stru...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Inequality in Skills Explain Inequality of Earnings Across Advanced Countries?

The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and ski...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

City Size Distributions As A Consequence of the Growth Process

The size distribution of cities in many countries follows some broadly regular patterns. Any good theory of city size distributions should (i) be able to account for this regularity, but also (ii) rely on a plausible eco...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

One Third of the World's Growth and Inequality

This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India u two economies that account for a third of the world's population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper c...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Spatial Agglomeration Dynamics

This paper develops a model of economic growth and activity locating endogenously on a 3-dimensional featureless global geography. The same economic forces influence simulataneously growth, convergence, and spatial agglo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cross Sectional Evolution of the US City Size Distribution

We report nonparametrically estimated stochastic transition kernels for the evolution of the distribution of US metropolitan area populations, for the period 1900 to 1990. These suggest a fair amount of uniformity in the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Unions and the Sword of Justice: Unions and Pay Systems, Pay Inequality, Pay Discrimination and Low Pay

Dispersion in pay is lower among union members than among non-unionists. This reflects two factors. First, union members and jobs are more homogeneous than their non-union counterparts. Second, union wage policies within...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Cross Country Growth Comparison: Theory to Empirics

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth u both empiric...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internet Cluster Emergence

Internet development holds the promise of transmitting economic value across physical space at zero marginal cost. In such a 'weightless economy', what factors matter for the location of economic activity and thus for ...Read more...