Urban renewal areas are popular but empirically understudied spatial planning instruments designed to prevent urban decline and induce renewal. We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of 22 renewal areas implemented in Berlin, Germany, to increase housing and living...

This paper analyzes the provision of residential parking in a monocentric city, with the ultimate goal of appraising the desirability and effects of regulations such as a minimum-parking requirement (MPR) per dwelling. The analysis considers three different regimes for provision of parking...

European empires had two key economic aspects: the extraction of colonial wealth by colonizers, and the relevance of trade for the colonial economies. I build a simple model of decolonization that puts these two elements at centre stage. By controlling policy in the colony, the mother country...

We examine long-run treaties for mitigating climate change. Countries pay an initial fee into a global fund that is invested in long-run assets. In each period, part of the fund is distributed among the participating countries in relation to the emission reductions they have achieved in this...

In recent years, sustainability has represented one of the most important policy goals explored in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature. But related hypotheses, performance measures and results continue to present a challenge. The present paper contributes to this ongoing literature...

This paper explores the conditions under which decentralization and fiscal competition lead to a policy of subsidizing cultural activities. A theoretical analysis discusses these subsidies as a form of local public good provision which makes a city more attractive to highly educated individuals....

The evolution of city growth is usually studied for relatively short time periods. The rise and decline of cities is, however, typically a process that takes many decades or even centuries. In this paper we study the evolution of Italian cities over the period 1300-1861. The first contribution...

What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study “Sites and Services” projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously...

This paper presents a unique historical experiment to explore the dynamics of institutional change in the Middle Ages. We have assembled a novel dataset, where information on political institutions for northern-central Italian cities between 1000 and 1300 is matched with detailed information on...

This paper questions the widely applied parallelism of demographic and economic development in characterizing urban shrinkage in Germany, and argues that the usage of population change as a single indicator leads to incorrect policy recommendations for combating urban shrinkage. As the cases of...