Has massive distribution of insecticide-treated-nets contributed to the reduction in infant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 15 years? Using large household surveys collected in 16 countries and exploiting the spatial correlation in distribution campaigns, we estimate the...

This study exploits the introduction of high subsidies for anti-malaria products in Senegal in 2009 to investigate if malaria prevents parents to invest in child health. Building upon the seminal paper of Dowetal. (1999), we develop a simple model of health investments under competing mortality...

Socio-economic interrelationships among regions can be measured in terms of economic flows, migration, or physical geographically-based measures, such as distance or length of shared areal unit boundaries. In general, proximity and openness tend to favour a similar economic performance among...

Traffic congestion contributes to longer travel times and increased travel time variability. We account for the dynamic nature of travellers' choices, by deriving a closed-form solution for the costs of travel time variability. The resulting travel delay cost function is linear in the mean...

We propose a flexible framework that allows for the relationship between housing prices and their determinants to vary over time. Our model incorporates housing-specific characteristics and macroeconomic variables, while accounting for a gradual global trend that reflects the unobserved external...

Immigration is a phenomenon of growing significance in many countries. Increasing social tensions are leading to political pressure to limit a further influx of foreign-born persons on the grounds that the absorption capacity of host countries has been exceeded and social cohesion threatened....

What is a 'sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations’? Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Aggregate indicators have been proposed to answer these questions. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indicators of...

Several studies have identified the impact of trade liberalization in developing countries on the return to education within a Mincerian framework through a difference-in-difference estimator or with industry-level measures of trade openness. These studies have typically estimated the return to...

This paper aims to provide a new methodological and empirical contribution to the rising literature on the relative performance and benchmarking of large cities in a competitive world. On the basis of a recent detailed database on many achievement criteria of 35 major cities in the world, it...

Some 2000 years ago, the average annual distance a person would normally travel, was approximately 500 km. The action radius of most people remained rather stable, but it rose gradually after the industrial revolution to some 1820 km (by car, bus, railway or aircraft) in the year 1960. Then, a...