How important are agglomeration economies for the location of foreign manufacturing plants? We investigate this question by combining innovations from previous studies and by taking advantage of a quasi-experimental setting: the political and economic transition in Romania. The recent, sudden...

Relatively little is known about the determinants of FDI location in transition economies. We exploit the large inflow of FDI into Romania, after the revolution in 1989, to study this question. Using a conditional logit setup, we find that external economies from service agglomeration are the...

In contrast to corporate and institutional investors with larger asset portfolios, single owner-occupiers cannot adequately diversify real estate risk. They therefore pay a risk premium that increases with the corresponding risk. Ceteris paribus, homeownership should be relatively less...

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group (via increasing property prices) but hurt the latter (via increasing development costs). More desirable...

We explore the impact of central government grants on local house prices in England using a panel data set of local authorities (LAs) from 2001 to 2008. Electoral targeting of grants to LAs by the incumbent national government provides an exogenous source of variation in grants that we exploit...

We use store-specific data for a UK supermarket chain to estimate the impact of planning on store output. Exploiting the variation in policies between England and other UK countries, we isolate the impact of Town Centre First (TCF) policies introduced in England. We find they directly reduced...

We hypothesize that as the distance of a residential move increases, the cost of collecting information on the destination housing market rises, the amount and quality of information collected fall, and the chances of making an ill-informed housing purchase decision increases, reducing the...

We explore the impact of different types of supply constraints on house prices in England by exploiting a unique panel dataset of 353 local planning authorities ranging from 1974 to 2008. Using exogenous variation from a policy reform, vote shares and historical density to identify the...

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints benefit the former group (via increasing property prices) but hurt the latter (via increasing development costs). More desirable...

We model residential land use constraints as the outcome of a political economy game between owners of developed and owners of undeveloped land. Land use constraints are interpreted as shadow taxes that increase the land rent of already developed plots and reduce the amount of new housing...