This paper looks at the determinants of regional housing construction using Israeli panel data. We propose a simple model of regional housing markets in which people prefer to live where housing is cheaper and building contractors prefer to build in regions where housing is more expensive. We...

The literature on regional growth convergence and economic disparities has tended to confound four interwoven measurement phenomena. i) mean reversion (so-called beta convergence) where richer regions move towards the average from above and poorer regions from below. ii) diminishing inequality...

Though individual studies of regional disparity may deal with separate development measures - population growth, wages, welfare, regional productivity, etc. - the use of an integrated indicator is often essential, particularly if a comparative (cross-country) analysis is required. In order to...

The job-chains model of local labor market change is a demand-driven analytic device for estimating the effects of new job creation. This paper explores the effects of restricting supply, i.e. limiting job access, on the model’s primary outcomes: vacancy chain multipliers, welfare effects...

We present a simple reproducible methodology for constructing regional capital stock data, which we apply to Israel. We find that capital deepening has been sigma-convergent since 1985. This process is “inverted” since capital stocks and capital-labor ratios in the richer...

Metropolitan Labor markets are characterized by gross flows, much larger than the traditional net measures of employment change might suggest. Standard impact analyses of employment change tend to either ignore these flows or treat them as a matter of 'job churning'. But in a metropolitan area...

In 1999 US Congress passed the National Air Quality and Telecommuting Act. This Act established pilot telecommuting programs (Ecommute) in five major US metropolitan areas with the express purpose of studying the feasibility of addressing air quality concerns through telecommuting. The major...