To date, analysis of the spatial dimension of New Zealand labour markets has been limited to administrative, rather than appropriately-defined functional, geographic units. This paper presents a preliminary classification of New Zealand into local labour market areas using area unit...

Between 1984 and 2003, New Zealand undertook comprehensive market-oriented economic reforms. In this paper, we use Census data to examine how the internal mobility of Māori compares to that of Europeans in New Zealand in the period after these reforms. It is often suggested that Māori are less...

Minority groups in many countries, particularly indigenous populations, live in very segregated environments. Many social scientists believe that social networks create poverty traps in these types of segregated environments, with a lack of positive role models reinforcing a lack of good job...

The proportion of New Zealand households living in owner-occupied dwellings has declined steadily since the early 1990s. The unemployment rate declined steadily as well, except for upward shifts due to the late 1990s Asian Financial Crisis and the Global Financial Crisis a decade later. Research...

Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in US destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. I use instrumental variables based on a "shift-share" of...

We estimate empirically the effect of immigration on house prices and residential construction activity in Spain over the period 1998-2008. This decade is characterized by both a spectacular housing market boom and a stunning immigration wave. We exploit the variation in immigration across...

We study the effects on employment, costs of living, and income inequality of local shocks in the housing market or in the productivity of a tradable good. We construct a two-region search and matching model in which housing is considered a necessity good. Mobility of labor implies that any...

Competitiveness differentials are blamed for the instability of the Eurozone. Most of the analyses focus on labour costs or labour-market institutions. This paper explores an additional source of differentials in competitiveness: land and building prices. European countries, especially France,...

We combine firm-level innovation data with area-level Census data to examine the relationship between local workforce characteristics, especially the presence of immigrants and local skills, and the likelihood of innovation by firms. We examine a range of innovation outcomes, and test the...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of school construction projects on home prices, academic achievement, and public school enrollment. Taking advantage of the staggered implementation of a comprehensive school construction project in a poor urban district, we find that, by six years...