Geography vs. Institutions at the Village Level There is a well-known debate about the roles of geography versus institutions in explaining the long-term development of countries. These debates have usually been based on crosscountry regressions where questions about parameter heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, and endogeneity cannot easily be controlled for. The innovation of Acemoglu, J...

This paper presents the effects of climate, topography, and natural ecology on public health, nutrition, demographics, technological diffusion, international trade and other determinants of economic development in Africa. The goal of this paper is to emphasize the need for intensified research on the issues at the intersection of ecology and human society. Geography was given emphasis because ...

This paper discusses a model of the New Economic Geography, in which the seminal core-periphery model of Krugman (1991) is extended by endogenous research activities. Beyond the common ’anonymous’ consideration of R&D expenditures within fixed costs, this model introduces vertical product differentiation, which requires services provided by an additional R&D sector. In the context of internatio...

Most models of regional agglomeration are based on the NEG (New Economic Geography) model in which returns to scale are pecuniary. We investigate the implications for regional agglomeration of a "Marshallian" model in which returns to scale derive from technological externalities. Workers are assumed to have heterogeneous "home region" preferences. The model is designed to explain how "second n...

Since the publication of Krugman's paper on "Geography and Trade" in 1991, a burgeoning literature has developed under the heading New Economic Geography. In the following we shall survey the NEG literature and critically evaluate its contribution relative to earlier work on similar topics. More specifically, we will focus our attention on a model that seems to have given new impulses to the in...

In this article, I reflect upon and attempt to understand the changing theoretical nature of post–World War II Anglo-American economic geography. In particular, I contrast the kind of theorizing that first occurred in the discipline during the 1950s with the very different kind now carried out under what has been called the “cultural turn” or the “new economic geography.” I argue that, during t...

Economic geography has begun to explore the options involved in micro-data. New databases have become available and new techniques and an increase in computer power allow their treatment. However, two major issues impede the use of these datasets: the lack of geocoded spatial location and lack of exhaustivity in coverage. In this article, I explore the possibilities of using large micro-scale f...