This study provides empirical evidence on the strengthening of the impact of house prices on the US macroeconomy. The stability of the house prices macro-link is tested in a small-dimensional vector autoregressive model over the last fifty years. The estimated break-points are used to split the...

Household income surveys often fail to capture top incomes which leads to an underestimation of income inequality. A popular solution is to combine the household survey with data from income tax records, which has been found to result in significant upward corrections of inequality estimates....

This paper estimates slum residents' willingness to pay for formalized land tenure in Pune, India. In so doing, it offers evidence that the legal assurance of slum residents' occupancy of their lands could benefit them. Previous studies have discussed legal and non-legal factors that...

Housing matters to the livability of cities and to the productivity of their economies. The failure of cities to accommodate the housing needs of growing urban populations can be seen in the proliferation of poorly serviced, high-density informal settlements. Such settlements are not new in the...

Location is one of the main characteristics households consider when buying a property or deciding where to live, since it determines accessibility to employment subcenters and public transport stations. Using a geographically-referenced data set on new housing developments, this paper estimates...

Kazakhstan's cities are hubs of economic opportunity and prosperity. But despite the government's ambitious targets, the pace of urbanization remains slow. This study focuses on two key constraints: (i) the very high cost of living in Kazakhstan's cities, and (ii) the near absence of a rental...

Slum upgrading programs are being used by national and city governments in many countries to improve the welfare of households living in slum and squatter settlements. These programs typically include a combination of improvements in neighborhood infrastructure, land tenure, and building...

This paper estimates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral and North-South-East-West Highways in India on welfare, social inclusion, and environmental quality. The analysis uses district-level data for 1994-2011 and the difference-in-difference method. The results suggest that the highways...

The size of the economic shocks triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of the associated non-pharmaceutical interventions have not been fully assessed, because the official economic indicators have not been published. This paper provides estimates of the economic impacts of the...

This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 and uncooperative trade policies on world food markets. It quantifies the initial shock due to the pandemic under the assumption that products that are more labor intensive in production are more affected through workers' morbidity and containment...