U.S. policymakers are concerned that negative home equity arising from the housing market crash may be constraining geographic mobility and consequently serving as a factor in the persistently high national unemployment rate. Indeed, the widespread drop in house prices since 2007 has increased...

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of immigration on local election outcomes. Our analysis makes use of data on city districts in Hamburg, Germany, during a period of substantial inflows of immigrants and asylum seekers. We find significant and robust effects for changes in foreigner...

This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong over-representation of workers with particularly high and low skills...

We estimate a skill-based directional migration model to assess the effects of regional human capital agglomeration on labor migration in China. Upon accounting for regional differentials in skill-based compensation, cost-of-living, amenities, and the like, model estimates indicate the...

We model the behavior of rational forward-looking agents in a spatial economy. The economic geography structure is built on Fujita et al. (1999)'s racetrack economy. Workers choose optimally what to consume at each period, as well as which spatial itinerary to follow in the geographical space....

This paper shows that a job contains a different task package in a large city than the same job in a small city. We question whether the division of tasks is more extensive in large cities. Most datasets hinder such an empirical analysis as they lack spatial variation in job content. Using...

We examine job matching as a potential source of urban agglomeration economies. Focusing on college graduates, we construct two direct measures of job matching based on how well an individual's job corresponds to their college education. Consistent with matching-based theories of urban...

We study how in a city either opposite social norms remain or a particular code of behavior spreads and ultimately prevails. We develop a multicommunity model with overlapping generations. When young, an individual chooses a certain level of educational effort. The crucial feature is that the...

In this paper, I analyze the distribution of rental prices in Berlin using quantile estimates and decomposition methods. These methods have been rarely applied in the field of housing economics but have proven to offer relevant insights into the evolution of price distributions. The shift of...

We examine the relation between housing prices in an MSA and its urban economic base. We create and employ new forward-looking employment growth indices that measure the urban economic strength of an MSA and find that it accounts for a significant and sizeable portion of the house price...