This paper presents evidence that high speed rail systems, by bringing economic agents closer together, sustainably promote economic activity within regions that enjoy an increase in accessibility. Our results on the one hand confirm expectations that have led to huge public investments into...

We reconcile conflicting evidence on the magnitude of the elasticity of substitution of land for capital, which is a key determinant of the relationship between the price of land and the density of land use. We first compare the performance of classic estimation approaches with a new estimation...

We propose a method to estimate the capitalized value of the architectural design quality of a neighbourhood. Our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neighbourhoods and comparing the differences across neighbourhoods. We...

To assess the likely effects of population ageing on the outcomes of direct democracy, we analyze the effect of age on voting decisions in public referenda. To this end, we provide the first quantitative review of the literature and a case study of the Stuttgart 21 referendum on one of the...

Cities around the world are experiencing unprecedented vertical growth. Yet, the economics of skyscrapers remain empirically understudied. This paper analyzes the determinants of the urban height profile by combining a micro-geographic data set on tall buildings with a unique panel of land...

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 209 estimates of density elasticities from 103 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not been previously published and have been provided by authors on request or...

We estimate the spatially differential effects of a nationally uniform minimum wage that was introduced in Germany in 2015. To this end, we use a micro data set covering the universe of employed and unemployed individuals in Germany from 2011 to 2016 and a difference‐in‐differences based...

This paper provides a synthesis of the state of knowledge on the economics of skyscrapers. First, we document how vertical urban growth has gained pace over the course of the 20th century. Second, we lay out a simple theoretical model of optimal building heights in a competitive market to...

We develop a dynamic spatial model in which heterogeneous workers are imperfectly mobile and forward-looking and yet all structural fundamentals can be inverted without assuming that the economy is in a stationary spatial equilibrium. Exploiting this novel feature of the model, we show that the...

We harness big data to detect prime locations—large clusters of knowledge-based tradable services—in 125 global cities and track changes in the within-city geography of prime service jobs over a century. Historically smaller cities that did not develop early public transit networks are less...