This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...

In this paper, we provide novel evidence on the contemporaneous and persistent effects of regional policy. We apply a quasi-experimental identification strategy exploiting the fact that municipalities in the West-German Zonenrandgebiet (ZRG) were eligible for substantial regional transfers...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

This paper analyzes whether housing-related macroprudential policy has heterogeneous effects on house price growth in local housing markets. More specifically, we employ an extensive dataset of Belgian municipalities containing a multitude of drivers of local house price dynamics and examine the...

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the natural resource curse, which refers to a negative link between natural resource abundance and economic growth. It shows empirically that resource-rich countries appear to have a less developed financial system and investigates a potential...

Emission inequality across countries and the contribution of the energy mix and the sectoral composition of a country s energy use are of central importance to the climate debate. We analyze the evolution of inequality in global CO2 per capita emissions using both historical data on...