This paper analyses Russian city growth during the command and transition eras. Our main focus is on understanding the extent to which market forces are replacing command forces, and the resulting changes in Russian city growth patterns. We examine net migration rates for a sample of 171 medium...

Quality of life factors continue to gain importance in residential location decisions as well as location decisions of firms. One such factor is an attractive local landscape. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on the role of landscape amenities in local...

The aim with this study is to examine how career possibilities in the man's and the woman's occupations - in the country as a whole, as well as in the region where the couple resides - affect heterosexual couples' regional mobility. The context is Sweden - a country with a strong dual earner...

Internal migration flows from rural to urban areas have greatly contributed to population declines in many rural areas across both Europe and the US. At the same time there is mounting evidence for a tight connection between internal migration and shifts in labor demand, with the latter being...

The East-West gap in the German population is believed to originate from migrants escaping the socialist regime in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We use newly collected regional data and the combination of a regression discontinuity design in space with a difference-in-differences...

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having...

This paper examines the political economy of Russian city growth. For the 1980s, we model the growth of 168 Russian cities located in 71 Russian provinces (oblast level). We examine the role of both general socio-economic characteristics and specific state controls. Our goal is to understand the...

The US banking industry offers a unique, natural and fertile environment to study geography's effects on banks' behavior and performance. The literature on banks' operating performance, while extensive, says little about the influence of spatial interactions on banks' performance. We compute and...

This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific...

We examine voter support in 2008 for Constitutional Amendment 1 in Florida, which modifies a Proposition 13–like property assessment growth cap by allowing homeowners to port their exempted value to a new home. Despite claims by amendment proponents that it would lower property taxes, we do...