Pricing carbon emissions from a jurisdiction could harm the competitiveness of local firms, causing the leakage of emissions and economic activity to other regions. Past research concentrated on national carbon prices, but the impacts of subnational carbon prices could be more severe due to the...

Using the mass closure of development zones in 2004 as a natural experiment, we examine the causal effect of development zones on firm level TFP in China. The difference-in-difference estimator shows that on average, loss of development zone policies results in 6.5% loss of firms' TFP....

To estimate the local effect of establishing land grant colleges, I compare locations that receive a land grant college to "runner-up" counties that were in contention to receive the land grant but did not for as-good-as-random reasons. I find that establishing a land grant college causes an...

We evaluate the effects of one of a new generation of economic development programs, the California Competes Tax Credit (CCTC), on local job creation. Incorporating perceived best practices from previous initiatives, the CCTC combines explicit eligibility thresholds with some discretion on the...

How effective are policies aimed at integrating isolated regions? We answer this question using the construction of a highway system in one of the poorest regions in the United States. With construction starting in 1965, the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS) ultimately consisted of...

Place-based policies commonly target underperforming areas, such as deteriorating downtown business districts and disadvantaged regions. Principal examples include enterprise zones, European Union Structural Funds, and industrial cluster policies. Place-based policies are rationalized by various...

We study the long run effects of one of the most ambitious regional development programs in U.S. history: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Using as controls authorities that were proposed but never approved by Congress, we find that the TVA led to large gains in agricultural employment that...

Following the rationale for regional redistribution programs described in the official documents of the European Union, this paper studies a very simple multi-country model built around two regions: a core and a periphery. Technological spill-overs link firms' productivity in each of the two...

On October 6. 1979, the Federal Reserve announced what most people interpreted as a change in monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the effects of this change on the 1980-81 economy. The effects of the change are estimated from simulations with my model of the U.S. economy...

This paper formulates a back of the envelope approach to study the effects of monetary policy on household consumption expenditures. We analyze several transmission mechanisms operating through direct, partial equilibrium channels--intertemporal substitution and net interest rate exposure--and...