this paper investigates the effects of globalization, (export+import)/gdp, tariffs, total factor productivity and per capita capital stock on industrial profitability. we employ the price-wage gap as a proxy for profitability. data used has been made of pooled mean group estimation of dynamic heterogeneous panel, a technique recently developed in dynamic panel data literature. our results show ...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense of this observation, featuring fiscal decentralization, local governments as custodians of land use ...

Over the past several decades, significant efforts have been made to regulate the use of resource and pollution in most industrialized countries, and the stringency of pollution regulations has continued to increase globally. At the same time, physical and social infrastructures are influenced by changes in the use of resources which contribute to the wealth of many regions. Technical progress ...

In many developing country settings, and particularly in rural areas, the implementation of anything more than very rudimentary contracts for medical care providers, including public employees, is virtually impossible. In this paper, we examine the kinds of policy levers that governments might conceivably have available to induce physicians to serve in rural areas. Using simple models of screen...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Chinese urban income distribution across space and time in post-reform era. Our results suggest no evidence on income convergence across cities during the period 1984-2003. We find that cities with comparable income level are likely to be co-located in the same region; further, cities tend to mirror the mobility of their counterparts located in the same prov...

Industry-Wide Work Rules and Productivity: Evidence from Argentine Union Contract Data In the early 1990’s, the Argentine government promoted a framework for productivity-based negotiations between firms and unions at low levels of organization. The policy weakened the industry-wide collective bargaining system, which sets working conditions for all firms in an industry. This paper employs newl...

This paper explores the relationship between patterns of productivity growth and the development stage of an industry, using firm-level data on the cotton-spinning industry in Japan in the late-nineteenth century. It is found that patterns of productivity growth depend on the development stage of the industry. In the earlier stage of industrial development, the productivity growth of each firm,...

Williamson (1965) argued that catching up countries experiencing strong national growth tend also to see a widening in regional disparities, whereas in more developed economies strong national growth and falling regional disparities could go hand in hand. We find some evidence of a trade-off between national growth and regional dispersion in the EU’s Cohesion countries, notably in Spain and Ire...

This paper has two main objectives. First, it estimates the impact of related and unrelated variety of European regions’ knowledge structure on their patenting activity. Second, it looks at the role of technological relatedness and extra-local knowledge acquisitions for local innovative activity. Specifically, it assesses how external technological relatedness affects regional innovation perfor...

In many developing countries, agriculture hires at least as many workers as manufacturing industries. We investigate an economic geography model in which agricultural goods are costly to transport and in which manufactures hire labor from the local agricultural sector as unskilled labor. Our conclusions show that the parameters in the agricultural sector are crucial to determine the spatial con...