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Policymakers around the world are enforcing mobility restriction policies such as lockdowns, facemask requirements and social distancing to curb the spread of Covid-19. While these policies are effective in preventing the spread of virus, the economic implications are not well understood. We contribute to the literature by examining the impact of these policies on the offline retail sector. Specifically, we measure the effects of these policies on the daily number of shoppers passing by, which we refer to as ‘footfall’, along major shopping streets in Netherlands. We rely on unique proprietary Wifi data to accurately measure footfall. Our findings imply that all these policies attribute to a non-trivial reduction in footfall levels along shopping streets. While lockdowns led to a 50% reduction in footfall along major shopping streets, shopping streets faced with facemask regulations also experience a 25% drop in human traffic. A reduction in footfall translates into a substantial reduction in retail income of between 12% and 25%.

We study the economic effects of place-based policies in the housing market, by investigating the effects of a place-based program on prices of surrounding owner-occupied properties. The program improved the quality of public housing in 83 impoverished neighborhoods throughout the Netherlands. We combine a first-difference approach with a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design to address the fundamental issue that these neighborhoods are endogenously treated. Improvements in public housing induced surrounding housing prices to increase by 3.5%. The program’s external benefits are sizable and at least half of the value of investments in public housing.

We study the economic effects of public investments in historic amenities by looking at their impact on house prices. We distinguish between direct and indirect effects of investments. A nationwide housing transaction is used as well as data on investments in cultural heritage. A 1 million euro per square kilometre increase in investments in cultural heritage leads to a price increase of 1.5-3.0% of non-targeted buildings. We do not find evidence that the maintenance state of non-eligible properties is improved, suggesting that any price effect due to investments in cultural heritage is a direct effect of investments.

We aim to estimate the impact of historic amenities on house prices and sorting of households. Historic district boundaries enable us to measure the external view effect of historic amenities, defined as the effect of a historic amenity on the price of other buildings through an improved view from the other buildings. We use a semiparametric regression-discontinuity approach to control for unobserved location characteristics and focus on houses constructed after 1970. It is shown that the (external) view effect of historic amenities is 3.5% of the house price. Rich households have a higher willingness to pay for a view on historic amenities and therefore sort themselves in historic districts, which contributes to an explanation for the substantial spatial income differences within cities.

Modern central business districts are characterized by high-rise office buildings, but their presence cannot be explained by standard urban economic models only. We aim to explore the impact of other forces that explain the presence of tall buildings, by examining the existence of a building height premium. We find that Dutch firms are willing to pay on average about 4% more for a building that is 10m taller, implying a substantial premium associated with tall buildings. This premium is thought to be due to a combination of a within-building agglomeration economies, a landmark and a view effect. Given functional form assumptions on the agglomeration effect, the results suggest that the sum of the landmark and view effect is about 2.8–5.5% of the rent for a building that is five times the average height.

We gain more insight into the heterogeneity in firms' productivity regarding agglomeration economies. Given a production function that allows for input factor substitution, we identify ratios of firm-specific production parameters employing a hedonic price approach. We use unique microdata of commercial rents and firm characteristics, and employ semiparametric estimation techniques. The results show that agglomeration economies capitalize in commercial rents. Nevertheless, expenditure on agglomeration is in general limited: for example, it is on average only 5.3% of expenditure on office floor space. It is much higher in some sectors: for retail firms, it is about 20% of the expenditure on floor space.

Despite the near ubiquity of intertemporal choice, there is little consensus on the rate at which individuals trade present and future costs and benefits. We contribute to this debate by estimating discount rates from extensive data on housing transactions and spatiotemporal variation in property taxes in England. Our findings imply long-term average net of growth nominal discount rates that are between 3 and 4 percent. The close correspondence to prevailing market interest rates gives little reason to suggest that households misoptimize by materially undervaluing very long-term financial flows in this high-stakes context.

It has been argued that the relationship between knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) and multinational enterprises (MNEs) within the regional economy is advantageous for urban and regional dynamics. It is likely that KIBS aim to locate proximate to (internationally operating) MNEs because of agglomeration externalities. The impact of MNEs on the birth of KIBS has rarely been examined, and the research on the new formation of KIBS has mainly adopted a case study approach, thus limiting the opportunity for generalization. We have taken a more quantitative approach using a continuous space framework to test whether proximity is important for the co-location of KIBS and MNEs in the metropolitan area of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Our results, controlled for other location factors, indicate that KIBS are co-agglomerated with MNEs and that the presence of a MNE significantly influences the birth of KIBS nearby, but the effect on such start-ups is considerably smaller than the positive effect of the presence of already established KIBS. We discuss the implications for urban and regional development strategies and policy initiatives.

Paid parking is the recommended policy tool to deal with cruising for street parking. In the Netherlands, residents receive parking permits when paid parking is introduced, to increase their political support. We estimate the effect of this policy on residents by examining the effect of the introduction of paid parking on house prices for Amsterdam and Utrecht during a period of 30 years. We find no effect of this policy on house prices. This finding is consistent with the idea that residents only vote in favour of a local policy when it has no negative impact on their house prices.