Empirical researchers often have to map data provided for a "reporting" spatial unit, say counties in 1900, to a "reference" one, say, counties in 2010. We discuss a general method to create such crosswalks: computing the share of the area of each reporting unit nested in a given reference unit....

This study examines the spatial productivity and efficiency spillovers of Chinese provinces using a spatial Durbin production frontier model that accounts for persistent and transient efficiency using a panel dataset of Chinese provinces from 1985 to 2017. The role of spatial effects is often...

This paper analyzes the impact of ethnic heterogeneity and military conflict on the degree of regional consumption risk-sharing in Ukraine. Ethnicity and violent conflicts can influence risk-sharing e.g. through social capital, ethnic fractionalization, migration, and remittances. The sample...

A large literature on persistence finds that many modern outcomes strongly reflect characteristics of the same places in the distant past. These studies typically combine unusually high t statistics with severe spatial autocorrelation in residuals, suggesting that some findings may be artefacts...

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...

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...