This paper analyzes the relationship among economic geography, fertility and migration. The empirical evidence presented reveals that persistent regional variations in fertility exist within a country and that regional total fertility rates are negatively related to regional population density. A two-period overlapping generations model of endogenous fertility, incorporating n-regions, agglomer...

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including O notice, is given to the source. There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in acc...

We analyse the internal spatial wage and employment structures of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, using regional data for 1996–2000. A new economic geography model predicts wage gradients and specialization patterns that are smoothly related to the regions’ relative market access. As an alternative, we formulate a ‘Comecon hypothesis’, according to which wages and se...

The idea that economic institutions are determinants of long-run economic performance is largely associated with the work of Douglass North and several other economists in the post-War period. Although the importance of institutions has been recognized by many authors since at least Adam Smith (1776), much of post-War economics research ignored the importance of institutions for economic growth...

This paper develops a rigorous concept of institutions to investigate the interrelationships between institutional and economic change from the perspective of economic geography. We view institutions neither as behavioural regularities nor as organisations or rules, but conceive institutions as stabilisations of mutual expectations and correlated interaction. The paper discusses how economic in...

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 area of two different scales is that models that explain location of economic activities at one scale may not apply to other scales. We consider the proce...

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Tim Bunnel, Neil Coe, and Kris Olds for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies. Abstract The "firm" has been a contested analytical category in economic geography. Much of neoclassical economic geography takes the firm as a self-contained and homogenous "black box" capable of producing economic outcomes in space. The radic...

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...