We provide a spatial equilibrium model with skill heterogeneity and then bring the model to data on workers living in Italian cities. Theoretically, we postulate that agglomeration to affect both production and consumption. Moreover, we allow the evaluation of urban amenities to vary across...

Desde su creación en la década de 1960, el departamento del Cesar ha recorrido los picos más pronunciados de los ciclos económicos y sociales. En la década de 1970 se cayeron los precios del algodón y con ellos el auge económico con el que empezó el departamento. En la década de 1980 la...

Recent literature has aimed at evaluating human capital externalities by estimating the effect of human capital on wages at urban level. We argue that this methodology might not identify properly human capital spillovers. We consider a general equilibrium model based on Roback (1982) where both...

We combine growth theory with US Census data on individual schooling and wages to estimate the aggregate return to human capital and human capital externalities in cities. Our estimates imply that a one-year increase in average schooling in cities increases their aggregate labor productivity by...

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census...

The identification of aggregate human capital externalities is still not fully understood. The existing (Mincerian) approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital. As a result, it yields positive externalities even when wages...

In this paper we test for the first time whether the driving force behind the negative effect of income uncertainty on owner-occupancy propensities is risk aversion or credit constraints. To disentangle this puzzle we estimate reduced form equations using Italian data. Consistent with the...

We investigate the socio-economic determinants of mortgage delinquency in 12 EU countries and observe that income volatility significantly increases the mortgage delinquency risk. This pattern even holds for borrowers with higher-income profiles if volatility in income is high enough. From this...

Unionism in the United States is contagious; it spills out of coal mines and steel mills into other establishments in the neighborhood, like hospitals and supermarkets. The geographic spillover of unionism is documented here using a newly constructed establishment level data on unionism that is...

We examine the impact of asset liquidation value on debt contracting using a unique set of commercial property non-recourse loan contracts. We employ commercial zoning regulation to capture the flexibility of a property's permitted uses as a measure of an asset's redeployability or value in its...