Spatial sorting plays an important role in accounting for disparities in average wages among locations. This paper shows that sorting also matters when addressing the relation between spatial externalities and wage distribution, i.e. across workers located at different percentiles of the wage...

Using a matched employer-employee database for Italy we look at the spatial distribution of wages across provinces. This rich database allows us to contribute at opening the black box of agglomeration economies exploiting the micro dimension of the interaction among economic agents, both...

This paper investigates the impact of labor markets and economies of agglomeration on firms location. We show that the existence of a lower bound on wage (e.g. a minimum wage or a reservation wage) introduces asymmetric location of firms. Moreover, changes in that lower bound or in global...

This paper explores the relationship between routine-biased technological change and agglomeration economies. Using administrative data from the Netherlands, we first show that in dense areas, jobs are less routine-task intensive (i.e. less repetitive and automatable), meaning that jobs cover a...

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...

In dynamic models of asset markets with asymmetric information and endogenous screening, the anticipation of signaling through delayed sales incentivizes originators to exert greater effort ex ante. A central prediction in those models is a positive relationship between screening effort and the...

This paper examines the relation between location, liquidity, and prices in urban housing markets. We build geospatial datasets for German and U.S. cities and show that housing liquidity and prices jointly decrease with distance to the city center. Using transaction-level data, we estimate a...

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...