How can policies improve the welfare of people in economically lagging regions of countries? Should policies help jobs follow people? Or should they enable people to follow jobs? In most countries, market forces have encouraged the geographic concentration of people and economic activities -...

Geography plays a prominent role in many problems in development economics--directly in analyses of the spatial distribution of important variables like poverty and productivity, and indirectly through the role of local spillovers in economic growth. Empirical work on these topics is complicated...

We propose a new strategy for a pervasive problem in the hedonics literature: recovering hedonic prices in the presence of time-varying correlated unobservables. Our approach relies on an assumption about home buyer rationality, under which prior sales prices can be used to control for...

This paper determines the extent to which gasoline price elasticity is affected by the availability of a substitute for driving—public transportation. Measuring the substitutability of public transportation presents an important practical difficulty. To address this, we predict individuals’...

When price-setting regulators haveobjectives other than maximizing socialsurplus, the conservation potential ofdemand-side technology standards can besignificantly diminished. This paperdemonstrates this by empirically recovering thesocially sub-optimal preferences of a group ofwater managers in...