Jonathan Dingel
Columbia University
Spring 2025
This graduate course covers topics in economic geography and regional economics. We will extensively cover the methods use to estimate, calibrate, simulate, and solve quantitative models in trade, spatial, and urban economics. The methods topics covered will include estimating gravity regressions with high-dimensional fixed effects, computing counterfactual outcomes by exact hat algebra, choosing and implementing numerical solution methods, and conducting Monte Carlo simulations.
This class is part of the trade and spatial second-year PhD sequence. It complements the classes taught by David Weinstein and Donald Davis. I will introduce concepts and models in a self-contained fashion, but I will assume that second-year students are familiar with the material taught in already-completed classes in the sequence.
Course materials: github.com/jdingel/econ6905
Class schedule: Wednesdays 8:10 AM - 10:00 AM
Email: jid2106@columbia.edu
Office: IAB 1126B
Office hours: By appointment, please email
Grades will be based on assignments (75%) and a final exam (25%).
Assignments will be posted to the GitHub repository. Submit your work via the Courseworks site.
Assignments will come in various forms:
- Economics: We will ask you to derive a theoretical result or survey an empirical literature.
- Programming: We will ask you to write a function that solves for equilibrium or estimates a parameter. See comments on computation below.
- Writing: I will ask to rewrite the abstract of a recent paper.
In addition to course material, the final exam may ask you to propose an original research idea, so you should be thinking about these during our class (and for the rest of your life!).
Scientific computation is important. I hope that you have already been exposed to the basics. Please glance at Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde's "Computational Methods for Economists" course. My workflow is outlined in my project template.
You have choices to make. See "A Comparison of Programming Languages in Economics." I recommend the Julia language. Julia's advantages are that it is open source and typically faster than Matlab. To get started doing economics in Julia, see Perla, Sargent, and Stachurski's "Lectures in Quantitative Economics." You may submit Julia or Matlab code as homework solutions. Please confer with me before submitting code written in other languages.
Standards for transparency and replicability are rising quickly. The AEA has appointed a Data Editor who will verify that code works prior to accepting papers for publication. Please write code for this class that is transparent and self-contained.
I may revise the course outline and reading list during the semester.
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Allen, Treb and Costas Arkolakis. 2015. Elements of Advanced International Trade. Sections 3.1-3.3.
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Costinot, Arnaud and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2014. "Trade Theory with Numbers: Quantifying the Consequences of Globalization." in Handbook of International Economics, Vol. 4, 197-261. Sections 1 and 2.
- Head, Keith, and Thierry Mayer. 2014. "Gravity Equations: Workhorse, Toolkit, and Cookbook." in Handbook of International Economics, Vol. 4, 131-195.
- Dingel, Gottlieb, Lozinski, Mourot. 2024. "Market Size and Trade in Medical Services." Working paper.
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Dingel, Jonathan I. 2017. "The Determinants of Quality Specialization", Review of Economic Studies, 84(4): 1551-1582.
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Matsuyama, Kiminori. 2019. "Engel's Law in the Global Economy: Demand‐Induced Patterns of Structural Change, Innovation, and Trade", Econometrica 87: 497-528.
- Glaeser, Edward L., and Joshua D. Gottlieb. 2009. "The Wealth of Cities: Agglomeration Economies and Spatial Equilibrium in the United States." Journal of Economic Literature, 47 (4): 983-1028.
- Allen, Treb and Costas Arkolakis. 2014. "Trade and the Topography of the Spatial Economy". The Quarterly Journal of Economics
- Ahfeldt, Gabriel M., Stephen J. Redding, Daniel M. Sturm, and Nikolaus Wolf. 2015. "The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall." Econometrica, 83(6): 2127–2189.
- Dingel, Jonathan I. and Felix Tintelnot. 2023. "Spatial Economics for Granular Settings." Working paper.
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Murphy, Kevin. "Location Choice: An Introduction to Compensating Differences. YouTube.
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Thisse, Jacques-Francois, Matthew A. Turner, Philip Ushchev. 2023. "Foundations of Cities". Working paper.
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Proost, Stef, and Jacques-François Thisse. 2019. "What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics?" Journal of Economic Literature, 57 (3): 575-643.
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Davis, Donald R. and Jonathan I. Dingel. 2020. "The Comparative Advantage of Cities." Journal of International Economics.
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Diamond, Rebecca. 2016. "The Determinants and Welfare Implications of US Workers’ Diverging Location Choices by Skill: 1980-2000." American Economic Review, 106(3): 479-524.
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Davis, Donald R. and Jonathan I. Dingel. 2019. "A Spatial Knowledge Economy." American Economic Review, 109 (1): 153-70.
- Donald R. Davis, Jonathan I. Dingel, Joan Monras, and Eduardo Morales. 2019. "How Segregated Is Urban Consumption?" Journal of Political Economy 127:4, 1684-1738.
- Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. 2023. "The Industrial Revolution in Services" Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics 1:1, 3-42.
- Xavier Giroud, Simone Lenzu, Quinn Maingi, Holger Mueller. 2024. "Propagation and Amplification of Local Productivity Spillovers" Econometrica 92:5, 1589-1619.
- Clare Balboni, Joe Shapiro. 2024. "Spatial Environmental Economics". Prepared for Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics.
- Tomas Domınguez-Iino. 2023. "Spatial Economics and Environmental Policies". Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics.
- Olivier Deschenes and Kyle C. Meng. 2018. "Quasi-Experimental Methods in Environmental Economics: Opportunities and Challenges". Handbook of Environmental Economics.