The effects of a policy measure often reach the consumer only after one or more intermediatesteps, for instance because the measure lowers the cost of an input for an industry producinga consumer good. This paper is concerned with the question how to measure such indirect effectscorrectly under...

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...

In this paper we estimate the impact of road development on household welfare in rural Papua New Guinea over the period between 1996 and 2010, using two cross-sectional household surveys and corresponding road maps. To deal with endogenous placement of road infrastructure programs we employ a...

Most studies of the effects of transport infrastructure on the performance of individual firms have focused on marginal expansions of the rail or highway network over time. In this paper, we study the short-run effects of a large discrete shock in the quality of transport infrastructure, viz....

This paper discusses the implications of autonomous-connected-electric-shared vehicles (ACES) for public finance, which have so far been widely ignored. In OECD countries, 5-12% of federal and up to 30% of local tax revenue are currently from fuel and vehicle taxation. The diffusion of ACES will...

Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

Innovation and technological change are central to the quest for regional development. In the globally-connected knowledge-driven economy, the relevance of agglomeration forces that rely on proximity continues to increase, paradoxically despite declining real costs of information, communication...

Policy makers spend large amounts of public resources on the foundation of science parks and other forms of geographically clustered business activities, in order to stimulate regional innovation. Underlying the relation between clusters and innovation is the assumption that co-located firms...

This paper addresses the question to what extent the performance of industrial sites is affected by their local economic structure and accessibility. For this aim, we test for the existence of statistically significant relationships between agglomeration externalities (specialization, diversity,...