Three Essays on the Link Between Geographical Location and Economic Behavior

Understanding how socio-economic characteristics of the area individuals live interplay with their behavior is an important issue both from an academic and a policy perspective. This PhD thesis is aimed at studying the role of location in three different economic choices. All the research questions will be addressed using empirical microeconomic methods. Chapter 2 studies how industrial characteristics of the area where entrepreneurs are located, and in particular the degree of industrial agglomeration, affect their resilience to economic shocks. Chapter 3 illustrates how early industrial and historical characteristics of the location affect the present voting behavior of people. Lastly, Chapter 4 investigates the effects of the cost of studying on the university choice, with a particular focus on the home to university distance. In all of these frameworks, results show that the characteristics of the geographical location matter and exhibit a strong over time persistence, suggesting that this is a dimension to be taken into account in the policy design process.