The association between types of food access and rising adult obesity rates is increasingly recognized, as a complement to the effects of declining physical activity. Previous studies have examined the effects on obesity of only a limited set of store types, such as grocery stores, fast food restaurants and big-box retailers, and they have ignored that certain behavioral factors, such as could ...

Our research examines the role of innovation and skill on the level economic segregation across U.S. metro areas. On the one hand, economic and urban theory suggest that more innovative and skilled metros are likely to have higher levels of economic segregation. But on the other hand, theory also suggests that more segregated metros are likely to become less innovative over time. We examine the...

We use a user-cost model to study how dispersed information among housing market participants a¤ects the equilibrium house price. In the model, agents consume housing services, speculate on price changes and are disparately informed about local economic conditions. Information dispersion leads agent to form heterogeneous expectations about housing demand and prices. Optimists, who expect high h...

Split Decisions: Family Finance when a Policy Discontinuity Allocates Overseas Work Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the Philippines that res...

A Simple Theory of Industry Location and Residence Choice This paper provides a simple theory of geographical mobility which simultaneously explains people’s choice of residences in space and the location of industry. Residences are chosen on the basis of the utility which mobile households obtain across locations. The spatial pattern of industry is determined by the location decision of a scar...

The Effect of Neighbourhood Housing Tenure Mix on Labour Market Outcomes: A Longitudinal Perspective This paper investigates the effect of different levels of neighbourhood housing tenure mix on transitions from unemployment to employment and the probability of staying in employment for those with a job. We used individual level data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), a 5.3% sample of ...

Discretionary Measures of Active Labor Market Policy: The German Employment Promotion Reform in Perspective This paper provides a preliminary assessment of recent reforms of German employment promotion policy. While several recent studies analyze the impact of measures of employment promotion for the case of Germany, no comparable study exists on the aggregate level, thus precluding any assessm...

This paper empirically analyzes the influence of proximity to road on HIV-infection using geographical data on road infrastructure and survey data collected by the Demographic and Health Surveys in six African countries. Firstly we show that living in proximity to a major road increases the individual risk of infection and that the observed relationship is sensitive to the use of the road. Seco...

We examine the impact of moving home, the distance moved and reasons for moving on both household income and labour market earnings for a representative sample of individuals using panel data. Our results suggest that there are monetary returns to migration which apply to both household income and labour market earnings. However, not all migrants enjoy these returns, which depend on distance mo...

How Do Stamp Duties Affect the Housing Market? Land transfer taxes are a substantial portion of the cost of moving house in many developed countries. Since stamp duties are endogenous with respect to the house price, we create an instrumental variable that is the stamp duty on a property, given that postcode’s starting house price and the national house price trend. In a specification with post...