Hosting a mega-event is a costly activity of short duration. Still, cities frequently compete to become host of all types of events. This paper examines the effect of staging the largest and most important sporting event in the world, the Summer Olympic Games, on the host city. Applying a...

Can the demise of the monocentric economy across cities during the 20th century be explained by decreasing transport costs to the city center or are other fundamental forces at work? Taking a hybrid perspective of classical bid-rent theory and a world where clustering of economic activity is...

We use a public referendum on a new air traffic concept in Berlin, Germany as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects shapes the outcome of direct democracy processes. We distinguish between homevoters, i.e., voters who are homeowners, and...

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...

Urban renewal areas are popular but empirically understudied spatial planning instruments designed to prevent urban decline and induce renewal. We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of 22 renewal areas implemented in Berlin, Germany, to increase housing and living...

Urban renewal areas are popular instruments in spatial planning to prevent urban decline and to induce urban renewal. 22 renewal areas were implemented in Berlin, Germany alone between 1993 and 1995, mainly to increase housing and living quality in the aftermath of the city s long division...

This paper develops a quantitative model of city structure to separate agglomeration forces, dispersion forces and fundamentals as determinants of location choices. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to worker productivity, which yield a...

We use a quasi-experimental research design to study the effects of 22 renewal areas implemented in Berlin, Germany, to increase housing and living quality in the aftermath of the city s division during the Cold War period. Our results suggest within the targeted areas that the policy has helped...

This paper shows that having access to a fast Internet connection is an important determinant of capitalization effects in property markets. Our empirical strategy combines a boundary discontinuity design with controls for time-invariant effects and arbitrary macro-economic shocks at a very...