The quality of the educational system is crucial to the most diverse socioeconomic and cultural aspects of a country. The objective of this paper is highlighting the importance of quality of education to explain the wide income disparities between Brazilian people. In face of such evidence, and...

Economist has traditionally been skeptical about the potential effects of place-based policies. Some authors (see, e.g., Overman and Nathan, 2013, and Kline and Moretti, 2014) argued that place-based policies are an imperfect solution to deal with social problems, for many reasons. First,...

Compulsory schooling increases average level of education in a country and provides other benefits, its effect on geographical distribution is, however, not obvious. We explore the effect of a sudden change in compulsory schooling in Turkey, that increased mandatory years of schooling from five...

This paper studies the educational efficiency as determined only by the variables directly controlled by the school, isolated from the influence of other environmental characteristics, such as student's socioeconomic status, that might influence efficiency as well. An alternative application of...

Grandparents act as the third biggest care giver besides day care and parental care for children below the age of 6 in most OECD countries. Despite its relevance, the effects of child care provided by grandparents on child and parental outcomes have received little attention in the literature....

In this paper I measure the impact of urbanisation and localisation economies on commercial rents (offices and industrial buildings) using unique micro-data on both commercial property transactions, as well as all firm (establishment) locations. I add to the literature in three important ways....

We study neighbourhood externalities caused by large public investments in poor neighbourhoods. A stylised theory of a linear city is proposed to guide interpretation of the magnitude and attenuation of the external effects generated by these public investments. We use a large Dutch nationwide...

Since 2010, particularly in urban agglomerations, the German housing market has experienced stark house price and rent increases. Immigration from rural and smaller settlements as well as international migration into German urban areas, has fuelled an increase in housing demand and led to severe...

This paper uses a simple model based on the board game Monopoly to analyze the drivers of house prices and wealth inequality. Simulations show that inequality generally builds up fast even if players have equal starting conditions and house prices are stable; rising house prices imply more...