Location Effects or Sorting? Evidence from Firm Relocation

We are grateful to Joseph Altonji, Hadar Avivi, Michèle Belot, Marianne Bertrand, Zach Bleemer, Stephane Bonhomme, Janet Currie, Ellora Derenoncourt, Jonathan Dingel, Gilles Duranton, Cecile Gaubert, Matthew Gentzkow, Joshua Gottlieb, John Grigsby, Rick Hornbeck, Anders Humlum, Simon Jäger, Philipp Kircher, Patrick Kline, Michal Kolesar, Francis Kramarz, Ilyana Kuziemko, Thibault Lamadon, Jeremy Lise, Jack Mountjoy, Matthew Notowidigdo, Ezra Oberfield, Eleonora Patacchini, Evan Riehl, Roman Rivera, Richard Rogerson, Evan Rose, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Jesse Rothstein, Karthik Sastry, Benjamin Schoefer, Isaac Sorkin, Gabriel Swagel, Chad Syverson, Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick for useful feedback. We would like to thank conference and seminar participants at NBER SI Labor Studies, Cowles, SOLE, Chicago-Princeton Conference on Spatial Economics, the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, HEC Paris, University of Houston, Boston University, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, and AREUEA 2026 for their comments. We thank Michael Amior and Ferdinando Monte for their thoughtful discussions. We thank Cedric Christensen, Adrien Mangold, Silvia Pedersoli, Noah Simon, and Alex Weinberg for outstanding research assistance. This work is supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program (reference: ANR-10-EQPX-17 - Centre d’accès sécurisé aux données – CASD). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• May 8, 2025
• June 17, 2025