Empirical evidence about income convergence among regions and countries is inconclusive and it is necessary to clarify the economic and institutional conditions for convergence. We investigate movements in the income distribution among regions in an integrated market with high mobility of labor,...

This study assesses the empirical relevance of the Harris-Todaro model at high levels of urbanization a feature that characterizes an increasing number of developing countries, which were largely rural when the model was created 50 years ago. Using data from Brazil, the paper compares observed...

I study the welfare consequences of land use regulations for low- and high-skilled workers within a city. I use detailed geographic data for Cook County and Chicago in 2015-2016, together with a spatial quantitative model with two types of workers and real estate developers who face regulations....

The lack of socioeconomic mobility among marginalized populations leads to the concentration of poverty, a long-standing issue in American cities. Empirical studies on neighborhood effects have found that poverty concentration adversely affects the socioeconomic mobility of...

Human resources are the key factor in the development of countries and regions. They affect the prosperity and competitiveness of the countries and regions. The purpose of the study was to assess the human resource potential in the V4 countries and to identify the groups of regions that share...

This paper demonstrates that India’s early 2000s mobile phone service expansion, or the “telecom boom” led to net rural-urban migration of about 13 million individuals out of which 4 million moved for employment. To estimate the effects, we exploit the heterogeneous expansion of telecom...

The idea of a housing deficit is a common, seemingly objective frame for housing policies. A deficit of between 3 and 8 million units in Indonesia has become a concern for the government in recent years. The wide range of estimates demonstrates not only that the methods used to estimate housing...

The emergence of slums is a common feature in a country's path towards urbanization, structural transformation and development. Based on salient micro and macro evidence of Brazilian labor, housing and education markets, we construct a simple model to examine the conditions for slums to emerge....

This paper exploits time and geographic variation in the adoption of Special Economic Zones in India to assess the direct and spillover effects of the program. We combine geocoded firm-level data and geocoded SEZs using a concentric ring approach, thus creating a novel dataset of firms with...

This paper examines the effect of mainland Chinese buyers' housing purchase in Hong Kong. Contrary to media's allegation on mainland buyers causing huge bubbles in Hong Kong housing market, we find that mainland buyers only constitute less than 4% of housing transactions in Hong Kong from 2001...