The extremely large disparities in employment rates across Italian regions, and the bad performance of the Italian economy in terms of job creation in the 80´s and early 90´s make job creation a top-priority in the economic policy agenda. This paper uses data on employment from 784 Local Labor...

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born...

In this paper we investigate the effect of labour income uncertainty on the probability of home ownership in Germany and Spain. This study is motivated by two facts. Firstly, theoretical models provide ambiguous results in this issue. Secondly, there is limited previous empirical evidence and...

Barriers to homeownership have traditionally been an important research and policy issue. In particular, the role of income volatility and credit constraints have been one of the main focuses in this concern. In this paper we test for the first time whether the underlying nature behind 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...

Two innovations in the last century have changed dramatically the cost of communicating and transmitting information: The first is the widespread adoption of telephony; the second is the internet. We study the implications of these changes in ICT for urban structure. We find robust evidence that...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of racial segregation using a new general equilibrium model that treats neighborhood compositions as endogenous. The model is estimated using unusually detailed restricted Census microdata covering the entire San Francisco Bay Area, and in...

This paper presents a new equilibrium framework for analyzing economic and policy questions related to the sorting of households within a large metropolitan area. We estimate the model using restricted-access Census data that precisely characterize residential and employment locations for...

We use a novel dataset and research design to empirically detect the effect of social interactions among neighbors on labor market outcomes. Specifically, using Census data that characterize residential and employment locations down to the city block, we examine whether individuals residing in...

This paper examines whether the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model can account for the housing markets facts, most of all the empirical anomaly known as ‘price dispersion’. Our main finding is that the model can account for the three basic facts of housing market, without any restrictive...