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Working Paper
Urban Growth Shadows
Does a location's growth benefit or suffer from being geographically close to large economic centers? Spatial proximity may lead to competition and hurt growth, but it may also generate positive spillovers and enhance growth. Using data on U.S. counties and metro areas for the period 1840?2017, we document this tradeoff between urban shadows and urban spillovers. Proximity to large urban centers was negatively associated with growth from 1840 to 1920, and positively associated with growth after 1920. Using a two-city spatial equilibrium model with intra-city and inter-city commuting, we show ...
Working Paper
The settlement of the United States, 1800 to 2000: the long transition towards Gibrat's law
A prominent strand of economic literature argues that population growth rates across locations areas are uncorrelated with the population levels of those locations (?Gibrat?s Law?). Such uncorrelated growth, it is argued, can account for the current distribution of population across locations. This paper shows that, on the contrary, locations? population growth throughout U.S. history has always been highly correlated with their initial population levels. Throughout the entire 19th century and the early 20th century, low-population locations tended to grow faster than intermediate-population ...
Working Paper
Human Capital Accumulation Across Space
This paper studies how human capital shapes the economic geography of development. We propose a model in which human capital acquisition costs vary across space, and regions with higher human capital invest more in human-capital-augmenting technology. Locations are interconnected through costly migration and trade. Using data on local income and schooling, we quantify the model at a 1° x 1° resolution globally. Over two centuries, the model mostly predicts persistence in the spatial distribution of development. Proportionally lowering education costs in sub-Saharan Africa raises local ...