The existence of amenities matters to understanding people’s residential choices. Our theoretical model extends the standard urban model by introducing exogenous amenities to explain population allocation within cities. To estimate the model predictions, we focus on historic amenities using detailed geolocated data for 579 European cities. We analyze how the...

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the effect of Low Emission Zones (LEZs) on traffic. LEZs are areas in which access is restricted for the most polluting vehicles. They have been found to be effective in reducing pollution, while the expected effect on traffic is not...

Concerns about housing affordability are widespread in cities worldwide, prompting discussions about rent control policies. This paper studies the effects of a rent control policy adopted in Catalonia in 2020 that applied to some but not all municipalities. The policy virtually covered all the rental market and forced ads and...

Cities are a human invention that facilitate interaction between people. Urban life makes us more productive, because it enables us to learn things from each other and specialise in more specific tasks. More recently, cities have also become places where people want to live, so that they may enjoy a...

Young individuals are currently living with their parents more than at any other point in time, while also spending more on housing. In this paper, I first show how labor market entry conditions affect housing tenure and affordability in the long term, by using the unemployment rate at the time...

Using data from the 545 largest European cities, we study whether the expansion of their highway capacity provides a solution to the problem of traffic congestion. Our results confirm that in the long run, and in line with the ’fundamental law of highway congestion’, the expansion in cities of lane...