Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano

Agglomeration in the Global Economy: A Survey of the 'New Economic Geography'

This review of recent contributions reveals common conclusions about the effects of integration on location. For high trade costs the need to supply markets locally encourages firms to spread across different regions. Integration weakens the incentives for self-sufficiency and for intermediate values of trade costs pecuniary externalities induce firms and workers to cluster together, turning location into a self-reinforcing process. Agglomeration raises the price of immobile local factors and goods, however, so for low transport costs, firms may spread to regions where those prices are lower.

The happy few: the internationalisation of European firms. New facts based on firm-level evidence

Policymakers tend to view the internationalisation of firms from the perspective of export, import and FDI statistics. A lack of statistical information at the firm level has so far prevented the systematic inclusion of firm-level analysis in the policymakers standard toolbox. Some firm-level datasets are now available, however, and their analysis reveals some new facts that are simply unobservable at the aggregate level.

Growing locations: Industry location in a model of endogenous growth

This paper constructs a model of endogenous growth and endogenous industry location where the two interact. We show that with global spillovers in RD O30; R12.

Growth and Agglomeration

This article presents a model in which growth and geographic agglomeration of economic activities are mutually self-reinforcing processes. Economic agglomeration in one region spurs growth because it reduces the cost of innovation in that region through a pecuniary externality due to transaction costs. Growth fosters agglomeration because, as the sector at the origin of innovation expands, new firms tend to locate close to this sector. Agglomeration implies that all innovation and most production activities take place in the core region. However, as new firms are continuously created in the core, some relocate their production to the periphery.

Cities and cultures

We investigate the existence of wage premium due to cultural diversity across US cities. Using census data from 1970 to 1990, we find that at the urban level richer diversity is systematically associated with higher average nominal wages for white US-born males. We measure cultural diversity in a city using the variety of languages spoken by city-residents. While the positive correlation between wages and diversity survives a battery of robustness checks, it seems to be larger once foreign cultures have been assimilated. Finally, instrumental variable estimation hints at causation going from diversity to wages. Comparing real and nominal wages across cities, we interpret these results as evidence that diversity enhances productivity.

Immigration and National Wages: Clarifying the Theory and the Empirics

This paper estimates the effects of immigration on wages of native workers at the national U.S. level. Following Borjas (2003) we focus on national labor markets for workers of different skills and we enrich his methodology and refine previous estimates. We emphasize that a production function framework is needed to combine workers of different skills in order to evaluate the competition as well as cross-skill complementary effects of immigrants on wages. We also emphasize the importance (and estimate the value) of the elasticity of substitution between workers with at most a high school degree and those without one. Since the two groups turn out to be close substitutes, this strongly dilutes the effects of competition between immigrants and workers with no degree. We then estimate the substitutability between natives and immigrants and we find a small but significant degree of imperfect substitution which further decreases the competitive effect of immigrants. Finally, we account for the short run and long run adjustment of capital in response to immigration. Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate elasticities in the labor literature since Katz and Murphy (1992). We also find a wage effect of new immigrants on previous immigrants in the order of negative 6%.

Openness to Trade and Industry Cost Dispersion: Evidence from a Panel of Italian Firms

We use Italian firm-level data to investigate the impact of trade openness on the distribution of firms across marginal cost levels. In so doing, we implement a procedure that allows us to control not only for the standard transmission bias identified in firm-level TFP regressions but also for the omitted price bias due to imperfect competition. We find that more open industries are characterized by a smaller dispersion of costs across active firms. Moreover, in those industries the average cost is also smaller.

Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the U.S.

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different skill groups that are imperfectly substitutable, one needs to articulate a production function that aggregates different types of labor (and accounts for complementarity and substitution effects) in order to calculate the various effects of immigrant labor on U.S.-born labor. We introduce such a production function, making the crucial assumption that U.S. and foreign-born workers with similar education and experience levels may nevertheless be imperfectly substitutable, and allowing for endogenous capital accumulation. This function successfully accounts for the negative impact of the relative skill levels of immigrants on the relative wages of U.S. workers. However, contrary to the findings of previous literature, overall immigration generates a large positive effect on the average wages of U.S.-born workers. We show evidence of this positive effect by estimating the impact of immigration on both average wages and housing values across U.S. metropolitan areas (1970-2000). We also reproduce this positive effect by simulating the behavior of average wages and housing prices in an open city-economy, with optimizing U.S.-born agents who respond to an inflow of foreign-born workers of the size and composition comparable to the immigration of the 1990s.

Changes in Transport and Non Transport Costs: Local vs. Global Impacts in a Spatial Network

We develop a multi-country Dixit-Stiglitz trade model and analyze how industry location and welfare respond to changes in: (i) transport frictions (e.g., infrastructure, transportation technology); and (ii) non-transport frictions (e.g., tariffs, standards and regulations). We show that changes in non-transport frictions, which are usually origin-destination specific, do not allow for any clear prediction as to changes in industry location and welfare; whereas changes in transport frictions, which are usually not origin-destination specific, may allow for such predictions. In particular, we show that reductions in transport frictions occurring at links around which the spatial network is locally a tree are Pareto welfare improving.

Integration, agglomeration and the political economics of factor mobility

This paper tackles the issue of the optimality of agglomeration in a two-region economy with skilled/mobile and unskilled/immobile workers. The market leads to the optimal outcome when transport costs are high or low. However, for intermediate values, it yields agglomeration whereas dispersion is socially desirable. We show that competitive lobbying on factor mobility by the two groups of workers sustains the second best optimum.