A quarter of the population in high-income countries lives in rural areas. However, existing empirical evidence on these areas in OECD countries is scarce. Over the past several decades, many rural areas have been declining. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether these struggling rural areas are...

This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use...

At the firm level, revenue and costs are well measured but prices and quantities are not. This paper shows that because of these data limitations estimates of returns to scale at the firm level are for the revenue function, not production function. Given this observation, the paper argues that,...

This paper extends the urban growth model of Duranton and Puga (2022) to explore the impact of cities on local firms and households and the aggregate economy of Germany. We adopt alternative micro-foundations for agglomeration economies and a non-linear specification of human capital...

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and the related "social distancing" measures, working from home (WfH) has suddenly become a crucial lever of economic activity. This paper combines survey and administrative data to compute measures for the feasibility of working from home among German employees....

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly...

Firms are more productive on average in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly...

Recent advancements in data collection have expanded the tools and information available for urban and spatial-based research. This paper presents an overview of spatial big data sources used in urban science and urban economics, with the goal of directing and enriching future research by other...

We examine Singapore's fairly homogeneous private-housing market and show that new apartments on historical multi-century leases trade at a non-zero discount relative to property owned in perpetuity. Descriptive regressions indicate that new apartments with 825 to 986 years of tenure remaining...