We test the hypothesis that local government officials in jurisdictions that have higher local sales taxes are more likely to use fiscal zoning to attract retailing. We find that total retail employment is not significantly affected by local sales tax rates, but employment in big box and anchor...

In this paper, we study the question whether suburbs should help finance the core public services of their central cities. We review three arguments that have been offered in favor of suburbs’ fiscal assistance to their central cities. First, the central city provides public services that...

We use large survey data sets of firms provided by the World Bank for China, India, and Brazil—Investment Climate Surveys—to address the important question: what determines the locational choice of firms among cities in these countries. We find that capital cities in all countries are...

This paper examines spatial variations in exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in urban areas of the United States, using geographic microdata from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators project. We find that average exposure in...

We estimated the effect of the share of mortgage lending by individual banks (together with some control variables) on two measures of financial stability - the bank Z-score and the nonperforming loan ratio - for a sample of 212 banks in 19 emerging Asian economies for 2007-2013 from the...

Considerable controversy exists regarding the costs and benefits of growth in the meatpacking and processing industry in the rural Midwest. This study uses proprietary datafrom the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Longitudinal Database (LDB) to investigate theeffects of this industry on social and...

The demographic change underway, declining adequacy levels from traditional pay-as-you-go old-age social security systems, structural reforms in pension schemes and the reduction in the traditional family support have increased the need for additional private savings to cover the old age income...

Berlin-Brandenburg airport (BER) has become well-known far beyond German borders due to substantial mis-planning and heavy delays in opening. Planned to open in March 2012 and to take over all air-transport services from Germany's capital city, with the other airports expected to close,...

Capital flows and real estate are pro-cyclical, and real estate has a substantial weight in economies' income and wealth. In this paper, we study the role of real estate markets in the transmission of bank flow shocks to output growth across German cities. The empirical analysis relies on a new...

This paper makes use of a novel dataset derived from mortgage contracts granted by the major lending institutions in Malta. This contains information about house prices and a number of important property characteristics. Together with geographic and sociodemographic variables, this information...