Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two explanations have been offered: agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity) and firm selection (larger cities toughen competition allowing only the most productive to survive). To distinguish...

Does productivity increase with density? We revisit the issue usingFrench wage and TFP data. To deal with the ‘endogenous quantity of labour' bias (i.e., urban agglomeration is consequence of high local productivity rather than a cause), we take an instrumental variable approach and introduce...

Measures of urban productivity are typically positively associated with city population. But is this relationship causal? We discuss the main sources of bias in the proper identification of agglomeration effects. We also assess a variety of solutions that have been proposed in the literature to...

In this paper, we study the mobility and housing choices of the elderly when retiring using household data collected in France. From a theoretical viewpoint, retirees are likely to decrease their housing quantity because of an income loss when retiring, but they may also increase it to benefit...

The role of innovative procedures in the mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals is investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Mortality is roughly similar in the three types of hospitals...

We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent...

This paper investigates spatial variations in product prices using an exhaustive micro dataset on fish transactions. The data record all transactions between vessels and wholesalers that occur on local fish markets in France during the year 2007. Spatial disparities in fish prices are sizable,...

In this paper, we investigate the use of interactive e¤ect or linear factor models in regional policy evaluation. We contrast treatment effect estimates obtained by Bai (2009)'s least squares method with the popular difference in difference estimates as well as with estimates obtained using...

The role of innovative procedures in the mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals is investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Mortality is roughly similar in the three types of hospitals...

The unemployment rate in France is roughly 6 percentage points higher for African immigrants than for natives. In the US the unemployment rate is approximately 9 percentage points higher for blacks than for whites. Commute time data indicates that minorities face longer commute times to work,...