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...

Ce travail compare tout d'abord les distributions de salaires et de qualifications de l'Ile-deFrance et du reste du pays. Les salaires sont plus élevés en Ile-de-France de 24%. Ces différences relèvent pour le quart de qualifications plus élevées et pour le reste d'une plus grande...

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...

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...

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,...

This paper studies the determinants of the regional disparities in the mortality of patients treated in a hospital for a heart attack in France. These determinants can be some differences in patient characteristics, treatments, hospital charateristics, and local healthcare market structure. We...