In December 2017, the U.S. Congress passed into law the Opportunity Zone (OZ) program, offering significant tax benefits for property investments in designated low-income census tracts. As investors effectively gain from higher income, opportunity zones should affect property prices. In this...

If one cluster increases local competitiveness, can politicians, by interlinking clusters, achieve an even better effect at the state level? To answer this question, the paper analyzes the "Cluster Initiative" introduced in 1999 by the Bavarian State Government. The purpose of the initiative was...

This paper studies the effect of the West Philadelphia Promise Zone Initiative on weeklyviolent crime rates in a high-crime area of West Philadelphia, where a series of public safetyand quality of life improvement grants were dispersed from 2014 to 2019. Results using adifference-in-differences...

The BioRegio contest and the BioProfile contest initiated by the German Federal Government have drawn much international attention as prototypes of a new kind of technology policy aiming at the exploitation of regional innovation and growth potential through clustering. There is, however, little...

Can better housing protect us from extreme weather conditions? Although economists and policymakers are certain about the health implications of housing upgrades, empirical evidence is largely missing or based on small-scale experiments in developing countries. This study provides...

Taking advantage of the structure of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), we study the tradeoff between efficiency and equity associated with different levels of discretionary power when delegating regulatory authority to lower levels of government. Exploiting an instrumental variables...

In assessing the riskiness of a mortgage loan, one of the primary underwriting criteria used by lenders and one of the macro-prudential measures used by policy makers is the LTV ratio at the time of origination. This ratio is critical because it determines the probability of a default and the...

We characterize Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) use in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units with the intent to explore whether the subsidy overlap responds to needs unmet by the HCV program alone. Lacking the data to contrast HCV use in and out of LIHTC units, we turn to a comparison of HCV...

I utilize a novel data on proprietary servicer call transcripts to investigate strategic borrower responses to mortgage forbearance program (13% with only 1.5% unemployed) contained in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. I document selective verification of unemployment...

We introduce the German Business Panel (GBP), a novel large-scale survey of German firms. The GBP periodically surveys executives and key decision-makers in a representative sample of German firms, taking stock of their perceptions, views, and expectations. A particular focus of the survey is on...