This paper examines a Massachusetts policy which encourages communities to raise money through referenda for preservation and affordable housing. I use difference-in-differences, fixed-effects, and quantile regression to compare home prices before and after such referenda in two towns. I include...

Does the ability to pledge an asset as collateral, after purchase, affect its price? This paper identifies the impact of collateral service flows on house prices, exploiting a plausibly exogenous constitutional amendment in Texas which legalized home equity loans in 1998. The law change...

Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized region in the developing world. Its urbanization rate of almost 80 percent is comparable to that of high income countries. However, cities in the region are struggling to provide the infrastructure needed for their millions of residents to...

Young highly educated workers developed in the 70's and 80's a preference for working in larger cities. As a consequence highly educated young workers in 1990 were over-represented in cities, in spite of the lower wage premium they earned for working in crowded metropolitan areas if compared to...

In an interesting and influential paper Robert Lucas (1993) considering the experience of East Asian small economies, suggests that "on the job" learning could be the principal engine of their miraculous growth in the last 20 years. In this paper I develop an overlapping generation model where...

A central feature of many models of location choice - whether of firms or households, within or across cities - is the role of local interactions or spillovers, whereby the payoffs from choosing a location depend in part on the number or attributes of other individuals or firms that choose the...

With the growing recognition of the role played by geography in all sorts of economic problems, there is strong interest in measuring the size and scope of local spillovers (i.e., simple anonymous agglomeration or congestion effects, or more complicated interactions between individuals or firms...

Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized region in the developing world. Its urbanization rate of almost 80 % is comparable to that of high-income countries. However, cities in the region are struggling to provide the infrastructure needed for their millions of residents to enjoy a...

The use of incentive packages has intensified as local governments compete for new plants and corporate relocations, and as private firms increasingly demand a deal. While incentives promise jobs and tax revenue, scholars and practitioners criticize their high cost and limited accountability....

This paper reviews recent literature that considers and explains the tendency for neighborhood and city-level economic status to rise and fall. A central message is that although many locations exhibit extreme persistence in economic status, change in economic status as measured by various...