Natural disasters are often described as acts of God. After the devastating Lisbon earthquake and tsunami of 1755— an event that killed tens of thousands and nearly erased the city from the map—Europe’s leading philosophers debated its meaning. Voltaire blamed nature. Rousseau famously replied: “Nature did not construct twenty thousand...

This paper studies the causal impact of street noise on housing prices. It focuses on a very dense urban environment and its entire soundscape, using granular data on listed flats and street noise. We employ a combination of hedonic price and fixed effects model, exploiting the regular grid shape of...

We examine the impact of city council members with real estate backgrounds on housing supply in California 1995-2019. Using candidate occupation data and a close-elections regression discontinuity design, we find that electing a developer increases approved housing units by 68% during their term. This effect fades after one term, suggesting...

Access to housing has become a major problem, ranking high on the lists of Spaniards’ top concerns in the latest surveys by the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (CIS) and Catalan Center for Opinion Studies (CEO). There are objective grounds for this concern. According to OECD data, in Spain, housing-related...

This paper explores the electoral effects of Barcelona's Superblocks pedestrianization policy, a green initiative designed to reduce car traffic and enhance urban environments. Using census tract-level data from the 2023 local elections, we assess the policy's impact on support for the incumbent mayor. Our findings reveal a positive and statistically...

This paper provides a theoretical framework to study the relationship between expanded road capacity, traffic volumes and increased economic activity. We build on Anas (2024) to show that increased traffic volumes do not necessarily lead to congestion if adjustments in econòmic factors, such as population or employment, are not substantial....