This paper investigates the ability of the new economic geography to explain the existence of the manufacturing belt in the United States around the turn of the 20 century using a model which subsumes both market-potential and factor-endowment arguments. The results show that market potential was central to the existence of the manufacturing belt, that it mattered more than factor endowments, a...

The emergence in the United States of large-scale "megaregions" centered on major metropolitan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. This paper uses a data set of more than 4,000,000 commuter flows as the basis for an empirical approach to the identification of such megaregions. We compare a method which ...

Abstract This paper surveys the literature on the implications of trade liberalisation for intra-national economic geographies. Three results stand out. First, neither urban systems models nor new economic geography models imply a robust prediction for the impact of trade openness on spatial concentration. Whether trade promotes concentration or dispersion depends on subtle modelling choices am...

The field of New Economic Geography (NEG) aims at explaining agglomeration based on increasing returns, monopolistic competition and international factor mobility. Deviating from existing approaches, this paper constructs a theoretical model based on capital market frictions. Firms compete monopolistically, but are lead by managers subject to moral hazard. Incentivizing managers is cheaper in r...

after globalization and advances in information and communications, two conflicting schools of thought in connection with the role of the place and geography emerged: the first school of thought, led to the doctrine of geography and location death parallel to the cyber advances, with a view to the reducing importance of place and physical proximity due to the emergence of virtual interactions. ...

This paper examines the importance of factor mobility within countries for the manifestation of agglomeration and location effects emphasized in the new economic geography literature. Working with a model of trade under monopolistic competition, the relationship of factor mobility (in particular labor) to industry adjustment and relocation is developed analytically, and then illustrated with a ...

In this paper, the nominal wage equation of a Core-Periphery model of New Economic Geography is derived. In order to show empirical evidence of the resulting hypothesis, the nominal wage equation is estimated for the Spanish provinces in the year 2003. Our results illustrate that the market access variable is statistically significant and quantitatively important in the explanation of the spati...