We study market rents in the neighborhood of asylum seeker hosting centers. Our empirical setting exploits the quasi-random opening of centers and spatial allocation of asylum seekers in Switzerland. Rents within 0.7km of an active center are found on average to be 3.8% lower than rents in the...

Round numbers affect behavior in various domains, e.g., as prominent thresholds or focal points in bargaining. In line with earlier findings, residential real estate transactions in Germany cluster at round-number prices, but there are also interesting (presumably cultural) differences. We...

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

This paper examines the fiscal motives behind municipal governments' decisions to allocate commercial and residential land when two categories of land use are subject to different fiscal revenue alternatives: business-related tax and/or land rent. We use urban parcel-level land transfers during...

Shocks to the demand for housing that originate in one region may seem important only for that regional housing market. We provide evidence that such shocks can also affect housing markets in other regions. Our analysis focuses on the response of Canadian housing markets to oil price shocks. We...

In this paper, we estimate the urban wage premia (UWP) in Italy, with its economy characterized by the interplay between collective bargaining and spatial heterogeneity in the cost of living. We implement a reduced-form regression analysis using both nominal and real (in temporal and spatial...

In this paper, we estimate the urban wage premia (UWP) in Italy, with its economy characterized by the interplay between collective bargaining and spatial heterogeneity in the cost of living. We implement a reduced-form regression analysis using both nominal and real (in temporal and spatial...

We show that the disposition effect–the tendency of investors to hold losers and sell winners–can be a source of overconfidence. We find experimental evidence that individuals update beliefs about their own investment ability based on realized gains and losses rather than the overall...

We theoretically show that there is a fundamental disconnect between the disposition effect, i.e., investors' tendency to sell winning assets too early and losing assets too late, and its common empirical measure, namely a positive difference between the proportion of gains and losses realized....

We estimate the ratio of private wealth to national income, βpt, for Switzerland from 1900 to 2020. Our results indicate that over the 20th century, βpt did not follow a U-shaped pattern as in most European countries. Instead, its was exceptionally stable at around 500%. We argue that this...