Why do cities differ so much in productivity? We document that most of the measured dispersion in productivity across US cities is spurious and reflects granularity bias: idiosyncratic heterogeneity in plant-level productivity and size, combined with finite plant counts. As a result, economies...

We analyse the impact of both the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the European sovereign and banking crisis of 2011-13 on firm-level productivity in France, Italy and Spain. We show that relying on a single break date in 2008 misses both the Eurozone crisis and countries' institutional...

We focus on the housing market and examine why nonlocal home buyers (NLBs) pay 15 percent more for houses than local home buyers (LBs). We estimate a housing demand model that returns heterogeneous willingness to pay parameters for housing attributes. Our results show that NLBs are willing to...

This paper studies the effect of structural change on the historical path of aggregate labor productivity growth for a large sample of European countries, and it builds a quantitative multi-sector growth model to analyze the potential impact that structural change may have on future productivity...