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We develop a new methodology to estimate the elasticity of urban costs with respect to city population using French house and land price data. After handling a number of estimation concerns, we find that the elasticity of urban costs increases with city population with an estimate of about 0.03 for an urban area with 100,000 inhabitants to 0.08 for an urban area of the size of Paris. Our approach also yields a number of intermediate outputs of independent interest such as the share of housing in expenditure, the elasticity of unit house and land prices with respect to city population, and within-city distance gradients for house and land prices.

Firms are more productive, on average, in larger cities. Two main explanations have been offered: firm selection (larger cities toughen competition, allowing only the most productive to survive) and agglomeration economies (larger cities promote interactions that increase productivity), possibly reinforced by localized natural advantage. To distinguish between them, we nest a generalized version of a tractable firm selection model and a standard model of agglomeration. Stronger selection in larger cities left-truncates the productivity distribution, whereas stronger agglomeration right-shifts and dilates the distribution. Using this prediction, French establishment-level data, and a new quantile approach, we show that firm selection cannot explain spatial productivity differences. This result holds across sectors, city size thresholds, establishment samples, and area definitions.

We propose a new nonparametric approach to estimate the production function for housing. Our estimation treats output as a latent variable and relies on a first-order condition for profit maximization combined with a zero-profit condition. More desirable locations command higher land prices and, in turn, more capital to build houses. For parcels of a given size, we compute housing production by summing across the marginal products of capital. For newly built single-family homes in France, the production function for housing is close to constant returns and is well, though not perfectly, approximated by a Cobb-Douglas function with a capital elasticity of 0.65.

The promotion system for French academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women. Promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information both on candidates and on those eligible to be candidates. Thus, we can examine the two stages of the process: application and success. Women are less likely to seek promotion, and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap. Being a woman also reduces the probability of promotion conditional on applying, although the gender difference is not statistically significant. Our results highlight the importance of the decision to apply.

This paper describes a novel concept of customer discrimination in the housing market, neighbor discrimination. We build up a matching model with ethnic externalities where landlords differ in the number of apartments they own within the same building. Larger landlords discriminate more often only if some tenants are prejudiced against the minority group. Testing the null hypothesis whereby minority tenants are equally likely to have a large landlord provides a natural test for the existence of neighbor discrimination. In an empirical application, we show that this null hypothesis is rejected for African immigrants in the French private rental market. We then show that the local proportion of large landlords is positively correlated with African tenants’ probability of being con?ned to public housing projects, whereas this is not the case of other demographic groups.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

We develop a methodology to accurately compute transport costs. Based on the real transport network, our measure encompasses the characteristics of infrastructure, vehicle and energy used, as well as labor, insurance, tax and general charges borne by transport carriers. Computed for the 341 French employment areas, road transport shipments and the period 1978–1998, this new measure is compared to alternative ones such as great circle distance, real distance, or real time. We conclude that these proxies do a very good job in capturing transport costs in cross-section analysis. However, important discrepancies limit the possibility of using them in time series analysis. Moreover, our measure allows us to identify the policies that most impact transport costs. We show that transport technology and market structure are responsible for most of the transport cost decrease. Infrastructure improvements only condition the spatial distribution of the gains. Finally, some implications for researchers and regional policy makers are derived.

We evaluate the evolution of productivity gains in cities in the People's Republic of China between 2002 and 2013. In 2002, rural migrants exerted a strong positive externality on the earnings of urban residents, which were also higher on average in cities with access to foreign markets through a seaport. In 2007 and 2013, city size (measured in terms of both employment density and land area) was the crucial determinant of productivity. Market access, whether internal or external, played no direct role. Rural migrants still enhanced urban residents’ earnings in 2007 and 2013, though the effect was less than half that in 2002. Urban gains and their evolution over time are very similar on a total and a per hour earnings basis. Finally, skilled workers and females experienced slightly larger gains than unskilled workers and males.

Measures of urban productivity are typically positively associated with city population. But is this relationship causal? We discuss the main sources of bias in the proper identification of agglomeration effects. We also assess a variety of solutions that have been proposed in the literature to deal with them.

We measure the past production of research articles by current members of European economics institutions. All EconLit journals are used, weighted to reflect differences in quality. Both a long (1971-2000) and a short (1996-2000) time period are considered. We also provide production indices that take into account the authors' career length. The total output of each research center is measured as well as its production per member. The focus is on 600 centers from eighteen European countries (EU 14, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, and Turkey). European centers are compared to the top sixty U.S. economics departments. Statistics regarding the concentration of article production across researchers, institutions, and countries are provided, as well as on publication habits.