Abstract: The dissertation provides a detailed study of the location strategy pursued by economic agents in space. The first chapter, "Spatial Pre-Emption by Chain Retailers: An Empirical Investigation," presents an empirical study of the location strategy pursued by multi-store retailers in an urban setting. Data were collected for the 1960-2002 period, on the location of chain supermarkets in the city of Greensboro, NC, and were merged with demographic variables from the Census Bureau. We estimate a discrete choice model where firms choose how many stores to open, their location; and which active stores to exit. We first investigate whether a retailer clusters its stores in space. We find that firms located new stores within proximity to their existing stores for most of the 1960-2002 period. Therefore, we empirically distinguish whether this is an attempt to crowd out the market from the competition (spatial pre-emption) or if cost considerations (spatial scope economies) were the reason. Spatial scope economies were relevant in the 1960-1980 period, but since then have lost importance. This indicates that pre-emptive behavior has increased in importance since 1980. We also test the model for robustness with respect to different geographic definitions of markets, and find that competition was more localized in the earlier half of the data. The second chapter, "Dynamic Spatial Competition Between Multi-Store Firms," proposes a dynamic model of an oligopoly industry characterized by spatial competition between multi-store firms. Firms compete in prices and decide where to open or close stores depending on demand conditions and the number of competitors at different locations. The contribution of the paper is three-fold: first, we provide a dynamic framework to study such oligopoly industries; second, we provide an algorithm to compute the Markov Perfect Equilibria (MPE) of the model; third, we illustrate the model with numerical experiments that analyze the propensity of multi-store retailers to use spatial preemptive behavior. We find that spatial preemptive behavior depends on the level of sunk costs and of consumer transportation costs. The third chapter, "Public Education Provision and the Median Ideal Policy: Evidence from School Quality in Brazil," is based on spatial models of political competition, where political candidates choose their running platforms in the issue space. We study how the provision of public education quality is determined within a politically competitive framework. In particular, we investigate the validity of the median ideal policy theorem by analyzing how public education quality is influenced by the distribution of income in society. Using data from Brazil we analyze the relation between public education policies implemented by elected politicians and the local distribution of income. We then test whether these relationships are consistent with the median ideal policy of the local citizenry by estimating the sensitivity of public education policy to different percentiles of the distribution of income.

Economic Geography is the most complete, up-to-date textbook available on the important new field of spatial economics. This book fills a gap by providing advanced undergraduate and graduate students with the latest research and methodologies in an accessible and comprehensive way. It is an indispensable reference for researchers in economic geography, regional and urban economics, international trade, and applied econometrics, and can serve as a resource for economists in government. Economic Geography presents advances in economic theory that explain why, despite the increasing mobility of commodities, ideas, and people, the diffusion of economic activity is very unequal and remains agglomerated in a limited number of spatial entities. The book complements theoretical analysis with detailed discussions of the empirics of the economics of agglomeration, offering a mix of theoretical and empirical research that gives a unique perspective on spatial disparities. It reveals how location continues to matter for trade and economic development, yet how economic integration is transforming the global economy into an economic space in which activities are performed within large metropolitan areas exchanging goods, skills, and information. Economic Geography examines the future implications of this evolution in the spatial economy and relates them to other major social and economic trends. Provides a complete introduction to economic geography Explains the latest theory and methodologies Covers the empirics of agglomeration, from spatial concentration measurement to structural estimations of economic geography models Includes history and background of the field Serves as a textbook for students and a resource for professionals

The first volume of this wide-ranging Handbook contains original contributions by world-class specialists. It provides up-to-date surveys of the main game-theoretic tools commonly used to model industrial organization topics. The Handbook covers numerous subjects in detail including, among others, the tools of lattice programming, supermodular and aggregative games, monopolistic competition, horizontal and vertically differentiated good models, dynamic and Stackelberg games, entry games, evolutionary games with adaptive players, asymmetric information, moral hazard, learning and information sharing models.

Issues of spatial competition play a key role in many antitrust matters in terms of both defining relevant markets and evaluating competitive effects. One area where this is particularly important is in retail competition. While detailed data for conducting empirical analyses is available in many retail industries, it is often the case that practitioners must define markets, at least preliminarily, under limited information. In this paper, we develop techniques for aiding in defining markets involving spatial competition under limited information.