Based on a representative survey of new college graduates in China, we examine the impact of college location on their location choice upon graduation. We use a discrete choice model and the BLP method to solve the endogeneity problem of housing cost and to estimate the unobservable location...

Regional public universities educate approximately 70 percent of college students at four-year public universities and an even larger share of students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They aim to provide opportunity for education and social mobility, in part by locating near potential students....

Despite worldwide expansion of higher education, the impact of higher education institutions on local economic activity is still poorly understood. We analyze the local economic effects of branch campus openings in Tennessee and Texas, two states representative of the underlying U.S. enrollment...

This paper analyses the impact of European Union (EU) funds on the performance of private firms. In particular, we examine a quasi-natural experiment consisting of a redrawing of administrative areas that expanded regional eligibility and led to a sudden increase in accessibility to EU grants...

This article analyzes the causal impact of advanced broadband accessibility on firm performance. We exploit a unique local policy intervention of a staged broadband infrastructure installation across rural municipalities in the Province of Trento (Italy), generating a source of exogenous...

On 1 January 1999, four major reforms took effect in Poland in the areas of health, education, pensions and local administration. After 20 years, only in the last case does the original structural design remain essentially unchanged. We examine the implications of this reform from the...

Theory predicts that the majoritarian electoral system should produce more targeted redistribution and lower politicians' rents than proportional representation. We test these predictions using micro data for the mixed-member Italian House of Representatives, which allow us to sidestep the...

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are...

In this paper, we investigate the use of interactive effect or linear factor models in regional policy evaluation. We contrast treatment effect estimates obtained by Bai (2009)'s least squares method with the popular difference in difference estimates as well as with estimates obtained using...

This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially-targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood...