Following the transposition of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive into Irish law, all properties offered for sale or to let in Ireland are obliged to have an energy efficiency rating.  This paper analyses the effect of energy efficiency ratings on the sale and rental prices of...

In many countries, house prices are subject to boom/bust cycles and in some these are linked to severe economic and financial instability.  Overheating can have both a price and a quantity dimension, but it is likely that they are linked by common drivers.  However, much depends on the...

Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries.  Railroad construction in colonial Kenya provides a natural experiment to study the emergence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium.  Using new data at a fine spatial level over one century...

Agriculture is the largest sector in most sub-Saharan economies in terms of employment, and it plays an important role in supplying food and export earnings.  Rural poverty rates remain high, and labor productivity is strikingly low.  This paper asks how these factors shape the role of...

We use the rapid expansion of the number of mineral mines in Sub- Saharan Africa to explore changes in local labor markets. Matching over two decades of panel data on industrial mines to survey data for half a million women and exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in the data in a...

We develop a new methodology for quantifying the tasks undertaken within occupations using 3,000 verbs from around 12,000 occupational descriptions in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOTs).  Using micro-data from the United States from 1880-2000, we find an increase in the employment...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries?  We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks.  Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion...

This paper examines how economic activity and market participation are distributed across space. Applying a non-parametric von Thünen model to Nepalese data, we uncover a strong spatial division of labor. Non-farm employment is heavily concentrated in and around cities while agricultural wage...