This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. To ground our welfare analysis, we develop a heterogeneous agent general...

We study how an aggregate bank flow shock impacts German cities' GDP growth depending on the state of their local real estate markets. Identification exploits a policy framework assigning refugees to cities on a quasi-random basis and variation in non-developable area for the construction of a...

A substantial retail appetite for real estate securities during this period may have significantly contributed to a real construction boom, but overly optimistic speculation in these securities may have led to overbuilding. The rapid deterioration of these securities and a near complete drop in...

Why are real estate bubbles so common? Can these bubbles actually do some good? Real estate booms have regularly occurred throughout the world leaving painful busts and financial crises in their wake. This paper suggests that real estate is a natural investment for more passive debt investors,...

There has been considerable consolidation in the hospital industry in recent years. Over 900 deals occurred from 1994-2000, and many local markets, even in large urban areas, have been reduced to monopolies, duopolies, or triopolies. This surge in consolidation has led to concern about...

We consider a model with several regions whose technological ability and factor endowments are identical and in which transport costs between regions are non-negligible. Nonetheless, certain goods are sometimes produced by multiple firms all of which are located in the same region. These goods...

We propose a unified model of limited market integration, asset-price determination, leveraging, and contagion. Investors and firms are located on a circle, and access to markets involves participation costs that increase with distance. Despite the ex-ante symmetry of investors, their strategies...

The Hotelling locational model and its adaptations to a circular city provide a core framework for research in industrial organization. The present paper expands the explanatory power of this model by incorporating a continuum of consumers with constant-elasticity demand functions along with...

For well-diversified investors in depreciable real estate, the trading decision may be made with the sole objective of maximizing the property's depreciation tax shelter net of all capital gain taxes and transaction costs.This paper develops a dynamic programming model in which the optimal...