We examine how exogenous changes in exposure to air pollution over the past two decades have altered the disparities in home values between Black and White homeowners. We find that air quality capitalization rates are significantly lower for Black homeowners. In fact, they are so much lower...

Using a quantitative spatial model as a data-generating process, we explore how spatial frictions affect the measurement of quality of life. We find that under a canonical parameterization, mobility frictions—generated by idiosyncratic tastes and local ties—dominate trade...

We embed a North-South trade model into an incomplete contracts setting where the production of heterogeneous firms can be geographically separated. When a Northern headquarter contracts with a Southern supplier instead of a Northern supplier, the presence of international incomplete contracts...

I define a composite amenity that provides aesthetic and consumption value to local residents: Urbanity. A novel data set of geo-tagged photos shared in internet communities serves as a proxy for urbanity. From the spatial pattern of house prices and photos I identify the value of urbanity in...

This paper extends a new line of research on urban squatting that focuses on the role of the squatter organizer. The model replaces the benevolent organizer from previous studies with a collection of competing, rent-seeking squatter organizers, a structure that may offer a realistic picture of...

Value-added data are an increasingly common evaluation tool for schools and teachers. Many school districts have adopted these methods and released the results publicly. In this paper, we study the release of value-added data in Los Angeles by the Los Angeles Times newspaper to identify how...

How have house prices evolved in the long-run? This paper presents annual house price indices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. Based on extensive data collection, we are able to show for the first time that house prices in most industrial economies stayed constant in real terms from the...

Using six years of firm-level data covering 224 regions of the enlarged European Union, we evaluate the importance to a firm of locating its activities (production, headquarters, R&D, logistics and sales) close together. We find that, after controlling for regional characteristics, being closely...

Standard tax competition models predict a "race-to-the-bottom" of corporate tax rates when firms are mobile. Recent theoretical literature has qualified this view by offering a theoretical explanation why this extreme prediction need not occur: central regions with large clusters of economic...

It is well understood that the two most popular empirical models of location choice - conditional logit and Poisson - return identical coefficient estimates when the regressors are not individual specific. We show that these two models differ starkly in terms of their implied predictions. The...