The U.S. population has been migrating to places with high perceived quality of life. With homothetic preferences, such migration can follow from the increased demand for amenities that accompanies broad-based technological progress. Under the baseline calibration of a general equilibrium model, a place with amenities for which individuals would initially pay five percent of their income grows ...

This paper examines the spatial distribution of jobs across U.S. counties between 1970 and 2000, and investigates whether sectoral employment is becoming more or less concentrated. The existing literature has found deconcentration (convergence) of employment across urban areas. Cities only cover a small part of the U.S. though. Using county data, our results indicate that deconcentration is lim...

There are two independent strands of literature on the geographic distribution of economic activities. One is the new economic geography that emphasizes product diversity, and the other is probabilistic migration that stresses taste heterogeneity in residential location. This article incorporates these two characteristics into a single framework, and analyzes how they affect the number and stab...

We investigate the contribution of different inputs, particularly different knowledge sources, on regional patenting output in the framework of a knowledge production function. The knowledge sources included are R&D employment, size of public research institutions by field of research (number of employees, budget), amount of university external research funds from private firms, public departme...

This paper studies the effect of terrorist attacks on the internal structure of cities. We develop an urban framework with capital structures suitable for the study of this question and analyze the long and short term implications of this type of events. In the long run, the analysis shows that a terrorist attack will affect urban structure only modestly, relative to the potentially large decre...

The Tiebout hypothesis (residential choice depends solely on local public goods) is extensively applied to explain geographic segregation, and the related literature finds that residents are segregated according to their heterogeneous preferences for public goods. This paper further examines the heterogeneous preferences for private goods in a spatial economy without public goods. Specifically,...

Collaboration and the exchange of knowledge is supposed to be eased by geographical proximity because of the tacit character of knowledge. Recently a number of scholars criticized this view on geographical proximity for being oversimplified and argue that the precise role of geographical proximity for knowledge exchange and collaboration still remains unclear. This paper analyses the role of ge...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the size of a country, the size of its cities, and the economic performance of the country. In order to do this we integrate three different literature, namely the literature on optimal country size, literature on historical processes of urbanisation and the performance of cities, and literature on the role of multinational firms in the global e...

In this paper we apply the wavelets methodology to the analysis of the comovements of for some MENA countries from June 1997 until March 2005. We decompose weekly stock market returns into di¤erent time scale components using the non-decimated discrete wavelet transform and then analyze the relationships among these variables at the di¤erent time scales. Keywords : Stock market returns, Wavelet...