Urban rail transit investments are expensive and irreversible. Since people differ with respect to their demand for trips, their value of time, and the types of real estate they live in, such projects are likely to offer heterogeneous benefits to residents of a city. Using the opening of a major...

Studies have shown a connection between finance and growth, but most do not consider how financial and real factors interact to put a virtuous cycle of economic development into motion. As the main transportation advance of the 19th century, railroads connected established commercial centers and...

We investigate the relationships of bank failures and balance sheet conditions with measures of proximity to different forms of transportation in the United States over the period from 1830-1860. A series of hazard models and bank-level regressions indicate a systematic relationship between...

Many local jurisdictions offer property tax exemptions or similar concessions to older citizens. Such exemptions represent substantial intergenerational transfers and may have important implications for local public finances. The consequences of age-based property tax exemptions depend upon the...

Widely different approaches to rail reform are evident across countries and within Australia. Reforms have involved structural separation (both vertical and horizontal) and varying degrees of private sector involvement. Evidence from Australian experience suggests that no one size fits all. The...

We use county and individual-level data from 1850 and 1860 to examine the economic impact of gaining access to a railroad. Previous studies have found that rail access was positively correlated with the value of agricultural land at a point in time, and have interpreted this correlation as...

The success of deregulation in creating a viable private rail freight system in the ?U.S. since 1979 is relatively undisputed. Deregulation has proceeded in three ways: (i) eased rate setting restrictions; (ii) simplified merger applications and approval procedures; and (iii) relaxed route...

The economic approach to cities relies on a spatial equilibrium for workers, employers and builders. The worker's equilibrium implies that positive attributes in one location, like access to downtown or high wages, are offset by negative attributes, like high housing prices. The employer's...

How much does the appearance of a house, or its neighbors, impact its price? Do events that impact the incentives facing homeowners, like foreclosure, impact the maintenance and appearance of a home? Using computer vision techniques, we find that a one standard deviation improvement in the...

We explore the stability of the conditioning variables accounting for the real estate valuation before and after the crisis of 2008-9, in a panel of 36 countries, recognizing the crisis break. We validate the robustness of the association between the real estate valuation and lagged current...