We examine the issue of possible portfolio diversification benefits into seven Middle-Eastern and North African (MENA) stock markets. We take the standpoint of the world investor and we construct portfolios in international and local currencies based on five optimization models and two risk measures. We then compare the portfolio out-of-sample performance based on Sharpe and Sortino ratios thro...

Tax competition for a mobile factor is different in ‘new economic geography settings’ compared to standard tax competition models. The agglomeration rent which accrues to the mobile factor in the core region can be taxed. Moreover, a tax differential between the core and the periphery can be maintained. The present paper reexamines this issue in a setting which, in addition to the core-peripher...

This paper focuses on the questions to what extent agglomeration effects and localized inter-organizational linkages influence different types of innovative performance of firms. Doing so adds to the relatively scarce firm-level literature regarding the role of regional environment for the innovative performance of firms by disentangling the often conflated effects of agglomeration effects and ...

We study the optimal dynamics of an AK economy where population is uniformly distributed along the unit circle. Locations only differ in initial capital endowments. Despite constant returns to capital, we prove that transition dynamics will set in. In particular, we prove that the spatio-temporal dynamics, induced by the willingness of the planner to give the same (detrended) consumption over s...

This paper analyzes the effect of skill heterogeneity on regional patterns of production and housing in the presence of pecuniary externalities within a general-equilibrium framework, assuming monopolistic competition in intermediate goods markets. It shows that the interplay of heterogeneous skills and comparatively homogeneous land demand triggers skill segmentation and agglomeration. The cor...

EU enlargement is supposed to entail profound impact on the location of economic activities in Europe. Although there is concern about the implications of enlargement for regional disparities in the EU, corresponding empirical results are still rare. The objective of this analysis is to provide empirical evidence on enlargement effects with a special focus on border regions in the EU27 since th...

This paper examines the long-term behaviour of a discrete-time Footloose Capital model, where capitalists, who are themselves immobile between regions, move their physical capital between regions in response to economic incentives. The spatial location of industry can exhibit cycles of any periodicity or behave chaotically. Long-term behaviour is highly sensitive to transport costs and to the r...

A simple two-country model of economic geography is constructed in order to examine the effect of tariff competition on the spatial distribution of manufacturing activities as well as on welfare. We show that when the transport cost is sufficiently small, tariff competition with firm migration leads to a core-periphery economy, where one of the two countries imposes no tariff in Nash equilibriu...

Real estate data exhibit autocorrelation and heterogeneity across both space and time. The literature is beginning to advance methods that account for the four components. This article accordingly introduces the Bayesian Maximum Entropy (BME) method to real estate analysis. In addition to controlling for spatiotemporal autocorrelation and heterogeneity, BME allows for probabilistic and missing ...

What leads the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to intervene in one conflict, but remain inactive in another? This paper analyzes all 221 documented conflicts between 1945 and 2011, trying to unveil the characteristics associated with UN intervention. Including geographical aspects, we find that proximity to two the five permanent members of the UNSC has a significant and meaningful effec...