Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

Structural transformation of agriculture typically involves a gradual increase of mean farm sizes and a reallocation of labor from agriculture to other sectors. Such structural transformation is often fostered through innovations in agriculture and newly emerging opportunities in manufacturing...

This paper empirically examines the emergence and functioning of land markets and their impacts on deforestation in Sumatra, Indonesia. While the evolution of land markets is ex-pected to promote deforestation activities by rural households, we find no sizeable impact, due to two major reasons....

In this article, Professor Kaswan argues that hoped-for greenhouse gas reductions cannot be achieved without reducing consumption. Given their control over land use and buildings, cities can play a key role in reducing consumption. She argues that, while existing federal proposals for a...

Given the phenomenon of growing urbanization, the pressure on food demand for a rising population as well as changing diets, China has had to resort to imports, becoming a net importer of food. In absence of external flows, this scenario is set to continue and could then materialize in a future...

Worldwide, most global cities are located in coastal zones, but a paradox of sustainability is especially striking for American global cities. This article examines such paradox drawn between globalization-induced development and coastal ecosystems. It focuses on two developmental components...

This paper shows that railroad building in Russia, as in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, improved the value of land, a classic benefit of transportation investment in largely agrarian countries. From a database constructed for this paper, we use cross-sectional data for the fifty...

This paper addresses the trade-off between unfavourable air pollution levels and favourable weather conditions for selecting a date for the staging of an outdoor event. For an event date that has been fixed, it presents a personal preference-based data-driven decision framework for individual...

Using detailed project-level data, we document a novel mechanism through which information externalities distort investment. Firms anticipate information spillover from peers’ investment decisions and delay project exercise to learn from their peers’ outcomes. To establish a causal...

We review the literature on the distribution of farm sizes in sub-Saharan Africa, trends over time, drivers of change in farm structure, and effects on agricultural transformation, and present new evidence for six countries. While it is widely viewed that African agriculture is dominated by...