Results

CEP discussion paper

Brief yet effective: group counseling and college access for disadvantaged students

Large socioeconomic gaps in higher-education access and completion persist even among similarly talented students with access to generous funding, pointing to an important role for information frictions and unequal suppo...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

Managing export complexity: the role of service outsourcing

As manufacturing firms expand globally, business services such as advertising and legal support become essential for entering new markets. Exploiting exogenous demand shocks, we document that French manufacturers increas...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Green gains from connectivity: highway expansion and forest quality

Roads are often linked to deforestation in frontier settings, but their effects in managed forests are less well understood. We investigate the intensive-margin response of forest outcomes to roads using China?s 2000?201...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Geography:

When market access gains do not spur urban growth

We revisit the natural experiments of division and unification of Germany. The negative shock to local market access following the division of Germany led to a fast and strong downward adjustment of the size of West Germ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade and the end of antiquity

What caused the end of antiquity, the shift of economic activity away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe? We assemble a large database of coin flows between the 4th and 10th century and use it to document the...Read more...

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

How polarised are citizens? Measuring ideology from the ground-up

We investigate whether the ideological polarisation of citizens has increased in Western democracies. We propose a novel methodology to identify individual ideologies by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation to political ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The signaling value of legal form in debt financing

We examine if a startup's legal form choice is used as a signal by credit providers to infer its risk to default on a loan. We propose that choosing a legal form with low minimum capital requirements signals higher defau...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics:

Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper provides causal evidence that close neighbors signigicantly influence potential applicants' decision to attend university. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and individual edu...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managing export complexity: The role of service outsourcing

As manufacturing firms expand globally, business services like advertising and legal support become essential for accessing new markets. This paper investigates how firms organize the provision of such market access serv...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Economic geography aspects of the Panama Canal

This paper studies how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed counties? market potential and influenced the economic geography of the USA. We compute shipment effective distances with and without the canal from ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Internet access and its implications for productivity, inequality and resilience

About one-fifth of paid workdays will be supplied from home in the post-pandemic economy, and more than one-fourth on an earnings-weighted basis. In view of this projection, we consider some implications of home internet...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Should I stay or should I go? Neighbors' effects on university enrollment

This paper investigates whether the decision to attend university depends on university enrollment of close neighbors. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and educational records from diff...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic geography aspects of the Panama Canal

This paper studies how the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 changed market access and influenced the economic geography of the United States. We compute shipment distances with and without the canal from each US count...Read more...

Journal article

The Lancet:

Transparency about the outcomes of mental health services (IAPT approach): an analysis of public data

Background: Internationally, the clinical outcomes of routine mental health services are rarely recorded or reported; however, an exception is the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service, which...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Health Economics:

Convenient primary care and emergency hospital utilisation

Participation and utilisation decisions lie at the heart of many public policy questions. I contribute new evidence by using hospital records to examine how access to primary care services affects utilisation of hospital...Read more...

Journal article

CESifo Economic Studies:

Weights to address non-parallel trends in panel difference-in-differences models

Causal inference using the difference-in-differences (DD) method relies on the untestable assumption of parallel counterfactual trends across units that are assigned to different treatments. To facilitate the application...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Fast track to growth? Railway access, population growth and local displacement in 19th century Switzerland

We study the effect of railway access on population growth in 19th century Switzerland. Our analysis is based on geo-referenced railway network information and an inconsequential units IV approach. Gaining direct railway...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Highways, Market Access and Spatial Sorting

We design a spatial model featuring workers embodied with heterogeneous skills. In equilibrium, locations with improved market access become relatively more attractive to the high-skilled, high-income earners. We then em...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Powering education

More than 1.3 billion people worldwide have no access to electricity and this has first-order effects on several development dimensions. In this paper we focus on the link between access to light and education. We random...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Speed 2.0. Evaluating Access to Universal Digital Highways

This paper shows that having access to a fast Internet connection is an important determinant of capitalization effects in property markets. We combine microdata on property prices in England between 1995 and 2010 with l...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Transportation costs and the spatial organization of economic activity

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that w...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Empirics of New Economic Geography

Although a rich and extensive body of theoretical research on new economic geography has emerged, empirical research remains comparatively less well developed. This paper reviews the existing empirical literature on the ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic Geography: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature

This paper reviews the new economic geography literature, which accounts for the uneven distribution of economic activity across space in terms of a combination of love of variety preferences, increasing returns to scale...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification

This paper exploits the division of Germany after the Second World War and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 as a natural experiment to provide evidence of the importance of market access for economic de...Read more...