We estimate the multiplier relying on differences in spending in infrastructure across Italian provinces and an instrument identifying investment changes that are large and exogenous to local cyclical conditions. We derive our instrument from the Law mandating the interruption of public work on...

Transfers to individuals, firms, and regions are often regulated by threshold rules, giving rise to a regression discontinuity design. An example are transfers provided by the European Commission to regions of EU member states below a certain income level. Researchers have focused on estimation...

Our aim is to explain how a small country can be viable as an international banking center (IBC). We build a model in which mobile investors choose between two banking centers located respectively in a small country and in a large country. These countries compete in two instruments, taxation and...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

Can infrastructure investment win “hearts and minds”? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship – the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment,...

Evaluations of new infrastructure in developing countries typically focus on direct effects, such as the impact of an electrifification program on household energy use. But if new infrastructure induces people to move into an area, other local publicly provided goods may become congested,...

This paper examines the effects of three alternative rules for public investment on output growth in a model with private and public capital. The rules considered are: (i) a fixed ratio of public capital to output; (ii) a fixed growth rate for public capital; and (iii) a fixed ratio of public...

This Paper develops a methodology to compute transport costs at low infra-country geographical levels. This simultaneously accounts for the real network infrastructure, a distance cost (fuel, repair, tolls), and a time opportunity cost (wages, insurance and general charges, vehicle use). When...

This Paper compares the observed distribution of the stock of infrastructures across the Spanish regions with the optimal allocation derived from a planning problem in which the observed degree of ex-post redistribution is taken as given. The results suggest that Spanish public investment policy...

Despite large regional policy expenditures, regional inequalities in Europe have not narrowed substantially over the last two decades, and by some measures have even widened. Income differences across states have fallen, but inequalities between regions within each state have risen. European...