This paper studies regional treatment effects of infrastructure projects on economic growth, employment and intermodal transport volumes. The recent Belt and Road Initiative provides an experiment that can be evaluated using matching econometrics. Our results show that the establishment of a new...

This paper studies the role played by politics in shaping the Italian railway network, and its impact on long-run growth patterns. Examining a large state-planned railway expansion that took place during the second half of the 19th century in a recently unified country, we first study how both...

We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households' spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. About 50% of survey participants report income and wealth...

The objective of this paper is to critically assess the use of simple rules for the social cost of carbon (SCC) that employ a rudimentary form of the Ramsey Rule. Two interrelated caveats apply. First, if climate change poses a serious problem, it is hard to justify an exogenous constant growth...

In 2011, Thailand experienced its worst flood ever. Using repeated waves of the Thai Household Survey, we analyse the flood's economic impacts. In 2012, households answered a set of questions on the extent of flooding they experienced. We use this self-identified flood exposure, and external...

We estimate the marginal external congestion cost of motor-vehicle travel for Rome, Italy, using a methodology that accounts for hypercongestion (a situation where congestion decreases a road’s throughput). We show that the external cost – even when roads are not hypercongested...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

This paper embeds firm dynamics into the Neoclassical model and provides a simple framework to solve for the transitional dynamics of economies moving towards more selection. As in the Neoclassical model, markets are perfectly competitive, there is only one good and two production factors...

We theoretically and numerically analyse the impacts for a small, open country with carbon abatement ambitions of joining a coalition with allowance trading. Besides welfare impacts for both the coalition and the small, open economy joining the coalition, we scrutinise how the studied policy...