The direct impact of local public goods on welfare is relatively easy to measure from land rents. However, the indirect effects on home and job location, on land use, and on agglomeration benefits are hard to pin down. We develop a spatial general equilibrium model for the valuation of these...

This paper investigates how in addition to personal characteristics the neighbourhood affects the individual transition rate from welfare to work. We use a unique administrative database on welfare recipients in Rotterdam, the second largest city of The Netherlands. We find that the exit rate to...

In this Paper, we show that with international externalities, different country sizes, imperfect competition and trade costs, tax competition for mobile firms is efficiency enhancing with respect to the free market outcome. Nonetheless, while the latter entails too many firms in the larger...

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor in large cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not choose equal taxes...

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of US-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all US-born workers in general. Because US and foreign born workers belong to different skill...

This paper analyzes some of the consequences of economic and monetary union of the two Germanies. Particular emphasis is given to the real implications for the supply side of the German Democratic Republic and for resource flows between two economic regions.

We show in the framework of a new economic geography model that when labour is heterogenous and productivity depends on the quality of the match between job and worker, trade liberalization may lead to industrial agglomeration and inter-industry trade. The agglomeration force is the improvement...

There are large spatial disparities in unemployment durations across the 1,300 municipalities in the Paris region (Ile-de-France). In order to characterize these imbalances, we estimate a proportional hazard model stratified by municipality on an exhaustive dataset of all unemployment spells...

In this paper we document a strong positive correlation of immigration flows with changes in average wages and average house rents for native residents across U.S. states. Instrumental variables estimates reveal that the correlations are compatible with a causal interpretation from immigration...