Does Islamic terrorism have an effect on the general attitudes towards Muslim minorities? We use the murder of Theo van Gogh as an event study to address this question. Specifically, we use the hedonic-market model and test for an effect on listed house prices in neighbourhoods where more than...

Housing transactions by owner-occupiers take two steps, purchase of a new property and sale of the old housing unit. This paper shows how the transaction sequence decision of owner-occupiers depends on, and in turn, affects housing market conditions in an equilibrium search-and-matching model of...

Using data on house sales and inventories of unsold houses, this paper shows that changes in sales volume are largely explained by changes in the frequency at which houses are put up for sale rather than changes in the length of time taken to sell them. Thus the decision to move house is key to...

Housing transactions by existing homeowners take two steps, a purchase of a new property and sale of the old housing unit. These two decisions are not independent, and their sequence may depend on the state of the housing market. This paper shows how the sequence of buyer-seller decisions...

We highlight the role of commuting cost, location and housing market in crime decision. By assuming that all crimes are committed in the central business district and that criminals create both positive and negative externalities to each other, we find that high wages or large levels of police...

A new and extensive panel of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) at the sector level is used to estimate the determinants of non-resource and resource FDI. Since FDI is I(1), we estimate panel error-correction models of FDI with spatial lags for FDI and market potential. Our main result is...

This paper studies whether conformism behavior affects individual outcomes in crime. We present a social network model of peer effects with ex-ante heterogeneous agents and show how conformism and deterrence affect criminal activities. We then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed...

This paper reviews the cross-country record of economic growth, using as organizing framework how economic theory has guided that empirical analysis. The paper argues that recent studies of economic growth - both empirical and theoretical - distinguish from previous work in three distinct ways:...

The convergence hypothesis has generated a huge empirical literature: this paper critically reviews some of the earlier key findings, clarifies their implications, and relates them to more recent results. Particular attention is devoted to interpreting convergence empirics. The main findings...

Cross-country evidence is presented on resource dependence and the link between volatility and growth. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income per capita, the average investment share, initial human capital, trade openness, the...