We investigate the impact of increasing concentration in local residential construction markets on housing production. We show that the increase in concentration in the past decade has led to lower production volume, fewer units in the production pipeline, and greater unit price volatility. Our...

We consider a linear city model where both firms and consumers have to incur transport costs. Following a standard Hotelling (1929) type framework we analyze a duopoly where firms facing a continuum of consumers choose locations and prices, with the transportation rate being linear in distance....

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

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...

There is much evidence against the so-called too big to fail hypothesis in the case of bailouts to subnational governments. We look at a model where districts of different size provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants of a central government can induce...

Motivated by differences in new-firm survival across regions, this paper explores the impact of regional human capital on new-firm survival rates. New-firm survival is interpreted through formation rates of surviving versus closed firms in the service sector. By incorporating knowledge...

This paper studies an intermediated market operated by middlemen with high inventory holdings. I present a directed search model in which middlemen are less likely to experience a stockout because they have the advantage of inventory capacity, relative to other sellers. The model explains why...

In this paper we study a class of evolutionary models of industrial agglomeration with local positive feedbacks, which allow for a wide set of empirically-testable implications. Their roots rest in the Generalized Polya Urn framework. Here, however, we build on a birth-death process over a...

This work explores the spatial distribution of productive activities in the Italian manufacturing industry. We propose an econometric model which tries to disentangle locationspecific from sectoral drivers in the dynamic process of spatial agglomeration. The basic idea is that the former...

Most countries exhibit large and persistent geographical differences in wages, income and unemployment rates. A growing class of place based policies attempt to address these differences through public investments and subsidies that target disadvantaged neighborhoods, cities or regions. Place...