Economist has traditionally been skeptical about the potential effects of place-based policies. Some authors (see, e.g., Overman and Nathan, 2013, and Kline and Moretti, 2014) argued that place-based policies are an imperfect solution to deal with social problems, for many reasons. First,...

The main goal of this paper is to provide evidence for the causal effect of the highway and railway infrastructure on the suburbanization of population in European cities. This is considered a major issue in Europe, which has never been studied before at this scale. We constructed a unique...

This paper examines how local governments adjust their spending, savings and taxes in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom and how they cope with the inevitable shortfall that appears during the bust. We focus on Spanish local governments given the intensity of...

This paper analyses the impact that Spanish road construction had on local population growth between 1787 and 1857. We find that the increase in market access associated to road accessibility had a substantial effect on local population growth. The impact was substantially higher on the...

Despite interest in the impact of land use regulations on housing construction and housing prices, little is known about the drivers of these policies. The conventional wisdom holds that homeowners have an influence on restrictive local zoning. In this paper, we contend that the party...