What determines the development of rural financial markets? Starting from a simple theoretical framework, we derive the factors shaping the market entry of rural microfinance institutions across time and space. We provide empirical evidence for these determinants using the expansion of credit...

An emerging literature on the geography of bohemians argues that a region's lifestyle and cultural amenities explain, at least partly, the unequal distribution of highly qualified people across space, which in turn, explains geographic disparities in economic growth. However, to date, there has...

We show, for the first time, a causal effect of local economic growth on infant mortality. We use geo-referenced data for non-migrating mothers from 46 developing countries and 128 DHS survey rounds and combine it with nighttime luminosity data at a granular level. Using mother fixed effects we...

We look at a part of the spatial angle of economic growth. We introduce a new measure Spatial Population Concentration (SPC) that captures the weighted average population surrounding every person within a geographic area. The weights are a function of the distance between the person in question...

The extensive literature on university graduates’ regional mobility highlights the importance of early mobility but is primarily descriptive. We contribute the identification of the effect of mobility upon high-school graduation on subsequent mobility across labour market regions. The data...

During the last decade, the Austrian labour market experienced a substantial outward shift of the Beveridge curve. Using detailed administrative data on vacancies and registered unemployed by region and skill level, we test which factors caused this shift. We find that the Beveridge curve...

In this paper, we provide new explanations for the puzzling findings in the literature that migrants do not decrease natives’ wages, and that skilled immigration can actually increase them. We develop a model with regional labor markets and heterogeneous firms in which workers of different...