We develop a framework to estimate the economic value of a recent zoning reform in the city of Sao Paulo, which altered maximum permitted construction at the city-block level. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that developers file for more multi-family construction permits...

Many questions in urban and regional economics can be characterized as including both a spatial and a time dimension. However, often one of these dimensions is neglected in empirical work. This paper highlights the danger of methodological inertia, investigating the effect of neglecting the...

The paper provides initial evidence that excess mortality rates by locality can be used as a statistically reliable predictor of looming mortality crises. Using recently published daily deaths figures for 7,357 Italian municipalities, we estimate the growth in daily mortality rates between the...

Regressions using data with known locations are increasingly used in empirical economics, and several standard error corrections are available to deal with the fact that their residuals tend to be spatially correlated. Unfortunately, different corrections commonly return significance levels that...