This handbook chapter presents the major advances made in the field of economic geography over the past decade. It starts by documenting a number of motivating empirical facts. It then shows how a quantitative regional model that combines the insights from two seminal models from an earlier...
This paper documents three new stylized facts showing that truckers in Colombia frequently choose to make complex chains of shipments in a single trip before returning home. It then provides a newmodel of optimal trucker trip-chaining with a general geography that is consistent with these facts....
How does the interplay of geography and political-economic forces affect the shape of nations? This paper presents a quantitative framework for characterizing the equilibrium evolution of national boundaries in a world with a rich geography. The framework delivers simple equilibrium conditions based...
What do recent advances in economic geography teach us about the spatial distribution of economic activity? We show that the equilibrium distribution of economic activity can be determined simply by the intersection of labor supply and demand curves. We discuss how to estimate these curves and...
How much of the spatial distribution of economic activity today is determined by history rather than by geographic fundamentals? And if history matters for spatial allocations, does it also matter for overall eciency? This paper develops a forward-looking dynamic framework for the theoretical and...
We consider a broad class of spatial models where there are many types of interactions across a large number of locations. We provide a new theorem that offers an iterative algorithm for calculating an equilibrium and sufficient and globally necessary conditions under which the equilibrium is unique...
Even for highways in rural mountainous areas, the estimated economic benefits from adding an additional lane-mile exceed the annual construction and maintenance costs. Federal, state, and local governments spent about $300 billion on construction and maintenance of U.S. transportation infrastructure...
Each year in the U.S., hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on transportation infrastructure and billions of hours are lost in traffic. We incorporate traffic congestion into a quantitative general equilibrium spatial framework and apply it to evaluate the welfare impact of transportation...
Between 2006 and 2010 the U.S. government built an additional 548 miles of border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Combining survey data from all major border crossing points with administrative data on 5.7 million primarily unauthorized Mexican migrants, we study how the border wall expansion...
By strategically reallocating crops, Indian farmers were able to hedge against increased volatility and increase the total gains from trade by about 15 percent. Trade between countries has steadily increased in recent decades. This has allowed producers to specialize and scale up, increasing average...
Trade liberalization changes the volatility of returns by reducing the negative correlation between local prices and productivity shocks. In this paper, we explore these second moment effects of trade. Using forty years of agricultural micro-data from India, we show that falling trade costs due to...
What is the best way to reduce trade frictions when resources are scarce? To answer this question, we develop a framework that nests previous general equilibrium gravity models and show that the macro-economic implications of these various models depend crucially on two key model parameters, which...
We develop a versatile general equilibrium framework to determine the spatial distribution of economic activity on any surface with (nearly) any geography. Combining the gravity structure of trade with labor mobility, we provide conditions for the existence, uniqueness, and stability of a spatial...
