Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

Theoretical and empirical research in economics suggests that bilateral migration triggers bilateral trade through a number of channels. This paper assesses the functional form of the impact of migration on trade flows in a quasi-experimental setting. We provide evidence that the relationship is...

This paper illustrates that the generalized propensity score method can easily be applied with multiple continuous endogenous treatment variables. Consistency proofs carry over straightforwardly to this general case, and the approach is shown to work well in finite samples with various...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a GDP per capita level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget....

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal competition through infrastructure in a New Economic Geography framework. It is shown that regional competition leads to convergence if the trade costs are high but induces divergence if trade cost have fallen below a certain value. Moreover, fiscal...

We quantify general equilibrium effects of place-based policies in a multi-region framework with mobility, trade and agglomeration economies. Using detailed data on EU transfers, we infer the local effects of different transfer types on productivity, income and transportation cost. Based on...

Despite interest in the impact of land use regulations on housing construction and housing prices, little is known about the drivers of these policies. The conventional wisdom holds that homeowners have an influence on restrictive local zoning. In this paper, we contend that the party...

We study whether local land use policies are modified in response to enhanced demand for building generated by a new highway, and examine the extent to which this effect of land use regulations affects building activity. We focus on the case of Spain during the last housing boom (1995-2007). We...

This paper provides evidence for the causal effect of the highway and railway infrastructure on the suburbanization of population in European cities. We adopt different measures of transportation infrastructure and estimate their joint effects on suburbanization using a two-step panel approach....