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...

This paper provides a comparative assessment of income segregation within cities in 12 countries. We use spatial entropy indexes based on small-scale gridded income data and consistent definition of city boundaries to ensure international comparability of our segregation measures. Results show considerable variation in the levels of income segregation across...

While natural hazards have never been so frequent in modern history, the political economy of disaster preparation remains largely understudied. To prepare for natural disasters, local governments can adopt mitigation measures (e.g., infrastructure elevation, retrofitting, shelter construction, etc.). However, in doing so, there is a trade-off between risk reduction and...

This paper investigates the contribution of increasing travel times to the persistent gender gap in labor market participation. In doing so, we estimate the labor supply elasticity of commuting time from a sample of men and women in US cities using microdata from the Census for the last decades. To...