It has been argued that the growth of cities is increasingly determined by the presence of amenities. We study the economic effects of large scale subsidised investments in historic amenities, by looking at their impact on house prices. We aim to distinguish between the direct and indirect...

Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generatesthose concerns ? Is it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil, we find that thedesire for greater public safety has a positive own-income effect, but a negative neighborhood-income...

The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

Using data for 134 locations in New Zealand, we study the effects of crime and agglomeration on urban amenity. We find that crime has significant negative effects on the value of urban amenity, with elasticities of approximately −0.06 for firms and −0.09 for workers. To put this effect in...

This paper replicates Costa and Kahn's analysis of locational choices of couples of highly educated persons for the Netherlands. We find increasing concentration of such power couples in the urbanized western part of the country. This trend occurs in spite of the absence of an urban wage premium...

Existing indices measuring the spatial distribution of economic activity such as the Krugman Specialisation Index, the Hirschmann-Herfindahl index and the Ellison-Glaeser index typically do not take into account the spatial structure of the data. In this paper, we first consider traditional...

We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between regions, because search is...

A large body of literature considers the productive advantages of cities, or "agglomeration economies". Most empirical studies report positive agglomeration economies, although large variation exists in the magnitude of estimates. We use a meta-analysis to explore this variation, drawing on...