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...

This paper investigates the impact of a devastating weather shock on child anthropometrics, using data from Mongolia. We employ a diff-in-diff strategy to identify the effect of an extremely harsh winter in 2010, which caused the death of about 20 percent of the national livestock. Results...

The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector has been found to be growing further. Different accounts exist as to the cause of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital and increased wealth contrasted with push...

Private transfers between households in developing countries have been extensively studied and shown to be economically important as mechanisms of risk sharing and income redistribution. We argue that migration and remittances have the potential to modify the prevalent transfer behaviour in...

We use a series of field experiments in the Palestinian Territories to explore the impact of exposure to shocks on risk, time and ambiguity preferences. We exploit the historical episode of the construction of the separation wall between the State of Israel and the West Bank as an exogenous...

In this paper I use a multi-period OLG model to study how a demographic shock is distributed among different generations. In particular, I investigate whether a funded pension system allows for a smoother adjustment than an unfunded system. The results suggest that the answer to this question...

This research analyses retirement behaviour in Austria based on a combined administrative dataset. Data from the Austrian social security database is merged with a dataset that contains very detailed information on all pension-relevant information on the individual level, e.g. insurance records...