We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French land price data. Our preferred estimate, which handles a number of estimation concerns, stands at 0.041. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent...

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly...

This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong over-representation of workers with particularly high and low skills...

We propose a new nonparametric approach to estimate the production function for housing. Our estimation treats output as a latent variable and relies on the first-order condition for profit maximisation with respect to non-land inputs by competitive house builders. For parcels of a given size,...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are commonworldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. Weexploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to supportmanufacturing jobs...

A growing wave of co-location programmes promises to boost growth for entrepreneurs and young firms. Despite great public and policy interest we have little idea whether such programmes are effective. This paper categorises accelerators and incubators within a larger family of co-location...

Business support policies designed to raise productivity and employment are common worldwide, but rigorous micro-econometric evaluation of their causal effects is rare. We exploit multiple changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a major program to support manufacturing jobs...

There are large spatial disparities in unemployment durations across the 1,300 municipalitiesin the Ile-de-France region (Paris Greater Area). In order to characterize these imbalances,we estimate a proportional hazard model stratified by municipality on an exhaustive datasetof all unemployment...

Mortality differences between university, non-teaching public and for-profit hospitals are investigated using a French exhaustive administrative dataset on patients admitted for heart attack. Our results show that innovative procedures play a key role in explaining the effect of ownership status...

Using a French exhaustive dataset, this paper studies the determinants of regional disparities in mortality for patients admitted to hospitals for a heart attack. These disparities are large, with an 80% difference in the propensity to die within 15 days between extreme regions. They may reflect...