U.S. policymakers are concerned that negative home equity arising from the housing market crash may be constraining geographic mobility and consequently serving as a factor in the persistently high national unemployment rate. Indeed, the widespread drop in house prices since 2007 has increased...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on local election outcomes. Our analysis makes use of data on city districts in Hamburg, Germany, during a period of substantial inflows of immigrants and asylum seekers. We find significant and robust effects for changes in foreigner...

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 estimate a skill-based directional migration model to assess the effects of regional human capital agglomeration on labor migration in China. Upon accounting for regional differentials in skill-based compensation, cost-of-living, amenities, and the like, model estimates indicate the...

We model the behavior of rational forward-looking agents in a spatial economy. The economic geography structure is built on Fujita et al. (1999)'s racetrack economy. Workers choose optimally what to consume at each period, as well as which spatial itinerary to follow in the geographical space....

We examine the relation between housing prices in an MSA and its urban economic base. We create and employ new forward-looking employment growth indices that measure the urban economic strength of an MSA and find that it accounts for a significant and sizeable portion of the house price...

This paper examines the spillover effects of infill developments, which involve developing vacant or under-used parcels within existing urban areas that are largely developed, on local housing prices. Employing a difference-in-difference specification on a sample of 275 new developments and...

Research suggests that merit scholarship programs increase college enrollment in states that adopt them but post-college migration may limit the effect these programs have on the stock of college-educated labor in those states. In this paper we consider the effect of Georgia's HOPE Scholarship...

A location in an economically active, high-amenity region could in many ways be a significant advantage for a university and its students and thus could also be positively linked to students' subsequent earnings. Based on this hypothesis, the present study empirically examines the effect of...

This paper combines individual data from the British Household Panel Survey and yearly population estimates for England to analyse the impact that cultural diversity has on individual wages. Do people living in more diverse areas earn higher wages after controlling for other observable and...