We use data from Reserve Bank of India to study the impact of India's Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on finance-dependent activity. Loan volumes increase by 20-30% in districts along GQ and are stronger in industries more dependent upon external finance. Loan growth begins with...

The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. This paper uses the staggered introduction of protected-area policies between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of...

China's land market features a substantial industrial discount: industrial-zoned land is an order of magnitude cheaper than residential land. In contrast to explanations centered on subsidies to industry or promoting industry growth, we emphasize the importance of future tax revenues from the...

A popular approach for estimating climate change impacts on agriculture is to rely on supply-side reduced-form regressions. These methods, which include the Ricardian approach, focus on how farmers and agricultural land market react to changes in climatic conditions, under the implicit...

We provide a spatial theory of clean growth to assess the global impact of the rise of renewable energy. We model the details of the combined production and transmission network of electricity ("the grid") that determine the supply and losses of energy in space. The local rate of clean energy...

This paper characterizes the allocations that emerge in general equilibrium economies populated by households with preferences of the additive random utility type that make discrete consumption, employment or spatial decisions. We start with a complete markets economy where households can trade...

The impact of shocks in dynamic environments depends on how forward-looking agents anticipate the path of future fundamentals that shape their decisions. We incorporate flexible beliefs about future fundamentals in a general class of dynamic spatial models, allowing beliefs to be evolving,...

We use new theory and data to study how firms endogenously form production networks across regions and countries. Supplier and buyer relationships form depending on firms' productivity and geographic location. We characterize the normative and positive properties of the spatial distribution of...

To fill the knowledge gap that previous studies ignore either housing or internal urban structure and to enable better fit with important stylized facts, we construct a two-sector optimal growth model of housing where housing is produced by land and housing structure/household durables. We...

Flood events and flood risk have been increasing in the past few decades and have important consequences for the economy. Using county-level and ZIP-code-level data from the United States during 1998-2018, we document that (1) increased flood risk has a large negative impact on firm entry,...