How have house prices evolved over the long run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. We show that real house prices stayed constant from the 19th to the mid-20th century, but rose strongly and with substantial crosscountry variation in the second half of the 20th century. Land prices, not replacement costs, are the key to understanding the trajectory of...

Were the new economic geography forces for industry agglomeration and dispersion at work in the movement of industry in pre-1931 Britain where transport costs were falling? This paper examines the issue empirically using a general model that nests the Heckscher-Ohlin factor endowment with new economic geography models. The evidence suggests that while the location of pre-1931 British industry w...

The paper empirically examines labor market matching as a source of urban agglomeration economies. We work from the hypothesis that job turnover leads to tighter labor matches and estimate the relationship between urbanization and the job mobility of young men. Using a panel from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find evidence that young men change jobs more frequently in their earl...

This paper estimates the determinants of labour productivity in European NUTS regions during 1989-1996. We compare three potential explanations of regional advantages: Technological capabilities (proxied by regional patents), agglomeration economies (employment density), and openness. To study the latter we use the number of airplane passengers embarked and disembarked in the region, and found ...

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the US tyre industry to analyse why the industry became so regionally concentrated around Akron, Ohio, a small city with no compelling advantages for tyre production. We analyse where the Ohio entrants originated and conduct various analyses of how proximity to other tyre firms affected the longevity of tyre producers. We also exam...

We exploit historical data on planned highways, railroads, and exploration routes as sources of exogenous variation, in order to estimate the effect of interstate highways on regional innovation: a 10% increase in a region?s stock of highways causes a 1.7% increase in regional patenting over a five-year period. In terms of the mechanism, we report evidence that roads facilitate local knowledge ...

Literature suggests that location should matter for R&D activities. However, attempts to empirically detect differences in innovation activity between regions have so far been rather unsuccessful. Using a unique data set which contains comparable information about manufacturing enterprises in eleven European regions, a number of significant regional differences in the efficiency of innovation a...

This Inquiry final research report investigates agglomeration economies and their ability to alter the economic productivity of cities, together with what are key drivers population growth mobility in Australia.