There has been a vast recent literature which has emphasized the role of human capital and knowledge on the economic growth process. This paper presents a model where the knowledge occurs through solving "problems." These problems which are partially idiosyncratic to the country. We think of a problem as a new technique or good. Each nation must master the problems associated with an activity i...

We review historical patterns of "economic geography" for the United States from the colonial period to the present day. The analysis is framed in terms of two geographic scales: regions and cities. The compelling reason for studying geographic areas of different scales is that models that explain the location of economic activities at one scale many not apply to other scales. We consider the p...

This paper describes the situation from the beginning of the industrial revolution when levels of urbanisation were dependent on geography and the historical situation and when the general level of urbanisation was low, through the nineteenth century in which agricultural productivity and industrialisation determined the levels of urbanisation. This period represents a dramatic increase in the ...

A basic result of new economic geography (NEG) models is that the proximity to consumer markets impacts wages and employment within regions. The ongoing process of European integration, being targeted on the reduction of barriers to trade and factor mobility, has presumably changed relative market access in Europe. The present paper aims at providing some evidence on spatial effects of integrat...

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...