Individual preferences over public policies should ideally be based on the possession of correct information about their reality. To test whether this holds, we conducted four waves of a survey, every six months since May 2020 (still under the COVID-19-lockdown), asking basic macro questions regarding the level of tax burden, of public debt, and of the underground economy in Spain. The percentage of correct responses (defined within broad ranges) never reaches 35%, and it is by far lowest for public debt. For the tax burden, left-wing individuals (with respect to right-wing) make more errors, and highly educated people (with respect to the rest of society) make fewer.

Even though place-based policies involve large transfers toward low-income neighborhoods, they may also produce territorial stigmatization. This paper appeals to the quasi-experimental discontinuity in a French reform that redrew the zoning map of subsidized neighborhoods on the basis of a sharp poverty cut-off to assess the effect of place-based policies on school enrollment into lower secondary education. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find strong evidence of stigma from policy designation, as public middle schools in neighbourhoods below the policy cut-off, which qualified for place-based subsidies, saw a significant 3.5pp post-reform drop in pupil enrollment, compared to their counterfactual analogues in unlabeled areas lying just above the poverty threshold. This «zone-and-shame» effect is immediate but does not persist, as it is only found for the first pupil-entry cohort in middle schools immediately after the reform. We show that it was triggered by the behavioral reactions of parents from all socioeconomic backgrounds, who avoided public schools in policy areas and shifted to those in other areas or, only for richer parents, to private schools. We uncover, on the contrary, only weak evidence of stigma reversion after an area loses its designation, suggesting hysteresis in bad reputations.

Immigrant inflows affect local house prices by increasing housing demand when housing supply is fixed. In this paper, I show that we can formally decompose total demand changes into changes stemming from an immediate increase in population due to new arrivals (“partial effect”) and additional changes in demand from relocated natives (“induced effect”). I propose a methodology to separately estimate these two effects using Spanish provinces’ data from 2001- 2012. Applying an instrumental variables approach, I find that a 1 p.p. increase in the immigration rate increases average house prices by 3.3% and rents by 1%. Partial demand estimates are 24% smaller than the total estimates, due to immigrants and natives locating in the same provinces. The results show that accounting for the impact of immigration on native location choices is key to understanding net demand adjustments, as partial and total effects can significantly differ depending on native population mobility.

England´s Town Centre First Policy, introduced in 1996, restricted the opening of new retail and other ‘traditional town centre activities’ to ‘Town Centre’ (TC) locations. The aim was to halt the decay of high streets. We explore the impact of the policy on the supply and location of grocery shops and patterns of shopping by comparing English with Scottish TCs before and after the policy change in England. Using store level census data, we show first that supply trends for grocery stores in TCs were similar in both countries prior to the implementation of the policy. After the policy took effect, however, stores in TCs increased relatively more strongly in England, but with no change in grocery employment. Second, using survey data, we show that the policy changed the composition of shops in TCs in favour of convenience-type shops supplied by the “big four” grocery chains. However, although it increased the number of TC shops, the policy had no effect on the number of shoppers choosing TC locations.

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 shape of city centers endowed or not endowed with these amenities is affected. We measure historic amenities with the location of buildings from the Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance-Baroque periods. Our results show that cities with historic buildings in their centers have steeper population density gradients, are more compact and centralized, and have been less affected by the suburbanization processes caused by transportation improvements. Heterogeneity analyses show that the quantity and the quality of historic buildings also matter. Several robustness checks controlling for natural and modern amenities and testing for the spatial scope of these amenities verify our main results.

This paper provides novel evidence of the mental health effects of the Covid-19 outbreak. Between April 2020 and April 2022, we run four waves of a large representative survey in Spain, which we benchmark against a decade of pre-pandemic data. We document a large and sudden deterioration of mental health at the beginning of the pandemic, as the share of people reporting being depressed increased from 16% before the pandemic to 46% in April 2020. This effect is persistent over time, which translates into important and irreversible consequences, such as a surge in suicides. The effect is more pronounced for women, younger individuals and those with unstable incomes. Finally, using mediation analysis, event studies and machine learning techniques, we document the role of the labor market as an important driver of these effects, as women and the young are more exposed to unstable income sources.