This paper reviews the emerging big data literature applied to urban transportation issues from the perspective of economic research. It provides a typology of big data sources relevant to transportation analyses and describes how these data can be used to measure mobility, associated...

As cities grow and spatially expand, agricultural land is converted into residential land. In many developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, this process is accompanied by a change in land tenure, whereby plots held under traditional customary arrangements are sold to new urban...

Building on a two-dimensional discrete version of the standard urban economics land-use model, this paper presents a tractable urban land-use simulation model that is adapted to developing country cities, where formal and informal housing submarkets coexist. The dynamic closed-city framework...

This paper combines local election results and geo-referenced road construction data over 1993-2012 to investigate political bias in road infrastructure investment in a democratic setting, focusing on the case of Mexico. Using a regression discontinuity design, the paper finds strong evidence of...

This paper explores the incentives for backyarding, an expanding category of urban land-use in developing countries that has proliferated South Africa. The theoretical model exposes the trade-off faced by the homeowner in deciding how much backyard land to rent out: loss of yard space...

This paper proposes a theory of urban land use with endogenous property rights. Socially heterogeneous households compete for where to live in the city and choose the type of property rights they purchase from a land administration which collects fees in inequitable ways. The model generates...

This paper is the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of farmland globalization whereby international investors directly acquire large tracts of agricultural land in other countries. A theoretical framework explains the geography of farmland acquisitions as a function of...

This paper estimates the impacts of road improvements on local employment and specialization in Mexico for 1986-2014, through changes in access to domestic markets and travel costs to ports and the U.S. border. Instrumenting for road placement endogeneity and addressing the recursion problem in...

The barriers faced by Chinese rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly education, in host cities could help explain why the majority of migrants choose to leave their children behind. This paper proposes a theoretical framework that allows for an explicit discussion of the...

This paper assesses the relation between access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa. Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades (1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant positive association...