This paper presents evidence that high speed rail systems, by bringing economic agents closer together, sustainably promote economic activity within regions that enjoy an increase in accessibility. Our results on the one hand confirm expectations that have led to huge public investments into...

Planning is about other things as well, but it is fundamentally an economic activity. It allocates a scarce resource but independently of prices or any market information. In analysing the effects this allocative mechanism has on housing supply (or, indeed, the supply of buildings for any given...

We study the impact of local taxation on the location and growth of firms. Our empirical methodology pairs establishments across jurisdictional boundaries to estimate the impact of taxation. Our approach improves on existing work as it corrects for unobserved establishment heterogeneity, for...

We test the impact of historic amenities on house prices and sorting of households within cities. Conservation area boundaries enable us to employ a semiparametric regression-discontinuity approach to measure the impact of historic amenities. The approach allows for household-specific...

We estimate the effect of the UK Stamp Duty Land Tax on household mobility using micro data. Exploiting a discontinuity in the tax schedule as a quasi-experimental setting, we isolate the impact of the stamp duty from other determinants of mobility. Our empirical strategy essentially compares...

Equilibrium of the housing market depends on a complex set of interactions between: (1) individual location decisions; (2) individual housing investment; (3) collective decisions on urban growth. We embed these three elements in a model of a dynamic economy with two sources of friction:...

The paper investigates the relationship between underground activities and financial deepening. The access to external finance requires entrepreneurs to disclose credible information through formal documentation. This requirement may be impossible to oblige to for many informal producers who...

This paper examines the determinants of self-employment success for microcredit borrowers. Theories of social capital and neighbourhood effects are integrated in an attempt to account for earnings differentials amongst a unique sample of microfinance borrowers. The paper posits that social...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the organisational comparative advantage of NGOs, and to develop a model which explains the set of circumstances uder which they emerge and dominate other types of firms. It is argued that the potential superiority of NGOs derives from two features: (1)...