This paper establishes a simple theoretical framework which comprises key forces that shape the structure and interrelation of cities to study the interdependencies between urban evolution and the environment. We focus on the potential of the unfettered market forces to economize on emissions. A...

We present a hedonic framework to estimate U.S. households' preferences over local climates, using detailed weather and 2000 Census data. We find that Americans favor an average daily temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit, will pay more on the margin to avoid excess heat than cold, and are not...

Measuring the social preferences of economic agents using experiments has become common place. This process, while incentive compatible, is costly and time consuming, making it infeasible in many settings. We combine standard altruism and warm glow choice experiments with a battery of candidate...

Consumption surveys often record zero purchases of a good because of a short observation window. Only mean consumption rates can then be inferred. We show that propensity scores can be used to estimate each unit's consumption rate, revealing the distribution. We demonstrate the method using the...

This paper develops a micro-founded city systems model with an endogenous number of cities to explore whether local governments establish the optimal city size when production processes involve environmental pollution. Our analysis delivers two key insights. First, if an optimal scheme to...

This paper analyses the optimal design of a single open-ended contract (SOEC) and studies the political economy of moving towards such a SOEC in a labour market where employment protection is highly discontinuous. We develop a computationally tractable approach to compare two economic...

We consider a tax-funded policy of admitting and integrating asylum seekers in a country in which the incomes of the native inhabitants are differentiated; for the sake of simplicity, we assume that there are just two groups of native inhabitants: high-income natives and low-income natives. As a...