This report estimates housing-cost-earnings differentials across labour market areas in Britain. We show that quality-adjusted housing costs rise on average, one for one with the skill-adjusted earnings of the average working household. However, the relationship is Ushaped, with relatively high...

Advocates for devolution of responsibility for economic development have frequently made a link between the governance of city-regions and their economic performance. The evidence they adduce for this does not clearly bear this out, since there are problems in defining the scale of the cities...

All governments are concerned with tackling the problems of areas that experience sustained decline and underperformance. In the UK, several factors have combined to raise profound questions about future government policy in this area. First, it is becoming increasingly clear that the recession...

In publicly funded health care systems policy-makers face a dilemma: placing low acuity emergency care services outside hospitals may widen access to care and divert patients from making costly hospital visits, but may also attract new patients that have little need for medical care. Using...

We exploit a unique panel of 75 metro areas ('cities') across the globe and employ a city-fixed effects model to identify the determinants of within-city changes in air pollution concentration between 2005 and 2011. Increasing car and population densities significantly reduce air pollution...

Most housing transactions in London involve trading long leases of varying lengths. We exploit this feature to estimate the time value of housing --- the relationship between the value of a property and the length of time it will be owned for --- over the range 1-99 years. To do so, we compile a...

The idea that local social capital yields economic benefits is fundamental to theories of agglomeration, and central to claims about the virtues of cities. However, this claim has not been evaluated using methods that permit more confident statements about causality. This paper examines what...

We propose a method to estimate the capitalized value of the architectural design quality of a neighbourhood. Our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neighbourhoods and comparing the differences across neighbourhoods. We...

This paper shows that having access to a fast Internet connection is an important determinant of capitalization effects in property markets. We combine microdata on property prices in England between 1995 and 2010 with local availability of Internet broadband connections. Rich variation in...

Over 140 billion CNY (1GBP=10CNY) has been spent between 2000 and 2012 in Beijing on the construction of new rail transit lines. This massive public investment allows me to examine the consequences of transport improvements for land prices near rail stations. Using unique vacant parcel-specific...