Using survey information about characteristics of personal contacts linked with administrative register information on employment status one year later, I show that unemployed survey respondents with many employed acquaintances have a higher job finding rate. Settlement in a socially deprived...

This paper is one of the first to estimate how the region in which an establishment is located affects its productivity, wage cost and cost competitiveness (i.e. its productivity-wage gap). To do so, we use detailed linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium and rely on methodological...

This paper is one of the first to estimate how the region in which an establishment is located affects its productivity, wage cost and cost competitiveness (i.e. its productivity-wage gap). To do so, we use detailed linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium and rely on methodological...

This paper uses two unique panel data sets to study the causal effect that armed conflict has over entrepreneurial activity in Colombia. Using a fixed effect estimation methodology at the plant level and controlling for the possible endogeneity of armed conflict through the use of instrumental...

We test Krugman's (1991) notion of risk sharing in pooled labor markets as one of the micro-foundations of agglomeration economies, i.e. we examine whether firms share risks from idiosyncratic and sector specific shocks through labor pooling. Estimating wage functions we find that job turnover...

The majority of the youth in Ethiopia live in rural areas where agriculture is the main source of livelihood. Using gender- and age-specific values of agricultural labor return (shadow wages), we systematically analyse trends, patterns and prospects of youth's labor supply in agriculture across...

We study scar formation and persistence after a house price bubble has burst using data on 3,089 US counties and county equivalents over the period 1980q1-2019q4. We date house price booms and busts for each county, and identify periods with explosive house price developments. Applying a sharp...

Urban sprawl and economic development brought new ways of correlating the efficiency and performance, and green buildings are spreading at higher levels. In this normative study, we discuss specific issues in how valuation methods could be considered when assessing green buildings. The real...

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 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...