Urban renewal areas are popular instruments in spatial planning to prevent urban decline and to induce urban renewal. 22 renewal areas were implemented in Berlin, Germany alone between 1993 and 1995, mainly to increase housing and living quality in the aftermath of the city s long division...

To address the challenges in rural areas the support for rural development with participatory approaches has a long tradition in EU funding programmes. One corresponding instrument is LEADER, which is a place-based, participatory approach to bring together public, private and civil society...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

What are the welfare and employment consequences of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for developing and emerging countries? Standard quantitative models of international trade which are generally used to assess the impact of PTAs assume full employment and hence abstract from (net)...

The ex ante theory of collateral states that better informed lenders, such as informal lenders, rely less on collateral. We test this by contrasting the use of collateral between formal and informal lenders in the same market. Indeed, formal lenders rely more often on collateral, controlling for...

This article reconsiders the empirical evidence on regional human capital externalities using longitudal survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). It complements the empirical literature on the role of human capital for explaining regional wage differences. Based on the framework...

There has been vast interest in the distribution of city sizes in an economy, but this research has largely neglected that cities also differ along another fundamental dimension: age. Using novel data on the foundation dates of almost 8,000 American cities, we find that older cities in the US...

The theoretical and empirical innovation literature stresses the importance of regional fac-tors and locational conditions for location choice of firms and their innovation success. Innovation activities are not equally distributed in space because agglomeration effects and specific regional...

We develop a heterogeneous-firms model with trade in goods, labor mobility and credit constraints due to moral hazard. Mitigating financial frictions reduces the incentive of high-skilled workers to migrate to one region such that an unequal distribution of industrial activity becomes less...