Working Papers
How does the memory of lives lost in past wars shape communities and the next generation of soldiers? We use geolocated data on British servicemen to study the legacy of the Great War mortality shock on local communities and on the behaviour of soldiers in WW2. We find that fatalities in WWI increased both the number of deaths of the next generation in WW2 and the likelihood that these soldiers would receive military honours. To explain these findings, we report that WWI deaths promoted civic-oriented and cooperative behaviours in the inter-war period, as demonstrated by the creation of lasting war memorials, veterans' associations and charities, and by increases in voter participation. Overall, we present evidence that, for British servicemen, the legacy of the Great War endured and was amplified by civic capital and the remembrance of fallen soldiers.
This paper studies governments' decision to request assistance to a third party in the event of a credit shock, and whether this decision may be different for continuing incumbents and for newly elected governments. First, we provide cross-country descriptive evidence showing that a change in office is associated with a larger probability to receive assistance from the IMF. Next, we report quasi-experimental estimates using a national program which bailed out the arrears of almost 4,000 municipalities in Spain. Using a close election-regression discontinuity design, we show that newly elected local governments were roughly 30 percentage points more likely to agree on an adjustment program with the national government in exchange for better financial conditions. Finally, we provide evidence consistent with continuing incumbents eluding to present an adjustment plan to avoid sending electors a negative signal about their past performance.
- CEPR Discussion Paper
Publications & Forthcoming
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024
We study how local grocery prices within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits an exogenous shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-based tax exemption in the city of Montevideo. The estimated elasticity of grocery prices to newly-built residential space lies between -3 and -4%. Using a multi-product model of imperfect competition, we show that this negative effect can result from either an expansion in varieties or firm entry in response to an increase in local demand. We report evidence supporting the varieties channel, with new residential development causing an increase in varieties of groceries available locally, as well as evidence on changes in the composition of stores. Our results have implications for urban planning policy and the broader discussion about winners and losers from neighborhood change.
- AEJ Version
- CEPR Working Paper
- CEP Discussion Paper
Journal of Public Economics, February 2024
We study how partisan alignment across levels of government affects coalition formation and government stability using a regression discontinuity design and a large dataset of Spanish municipal elections. We document a positive effect of alignment on both government formation and stability. Alignment increases the probability that the most-voted party appoints the mayor and decreases the probability that the government is unseated during the term. Aligned parties also obtain sizeable electoral gains in the next elections. We show that these findings are not the consequence of favoritism in the allocation of transfers towards aligned governments.
- CESifo Working Paper
Journal of Urban Economics, January 2024
We take advantage of two spatial discontinuities in Britain's Help to Buy (HtB) scheme to explore the effectiveness and distributional implications of mortgage credit expansion policies. Employing a Difference-in-Discontinuities design, we find that HtB significantly increased house prices and had no detectable effect on construction volumes in severely supply constrained and unaffordable Greater London. Conversely, HtB did increase construction numbers without a noticeable effect on prices near the English/Welsh border, an affordable area with comparably lax supply conditions. While HtB did not help would-be-buyers in already unaffordable areas, it boosted the financial performance of developers participating in the scheme.
- CEP Discussion Paper
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, March 2023
We study whether urban density affects the exposure of city dwellers to ambient air pollution using satellite-derived measures of air quality for the contiguous United States. For identification, we rely on an instrumental variable strategy, which induces exogenous variation in density without affecting pollution directly. For this purpose, we use three variables measuring geological characteristics as instruments for density: earthquake risks, soil drainage capacity and the presence of aquifers. We find a positive and statistically significant pollution-density elasticity of 0.13. We also assess the health implications of our findings and find that doubling density in an average city increases annual mortality costs by as much as $630 per capita. Our results suggest that, despite the common claim that denser cities tend to be more environmentally friendly, air pollution exposure is higher in denser cities. This in turn highlights the possible trade-off between reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and preserving environmental quality within cities.
- CEP Working Paper
- LSE USAPP Blog
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, February 2023
We study whether female-headed local governments in Spain are more likely to engage in gender sensitive policies such as long-term care support, pre-schooling, or work and family-life balancing services. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design estimated on the set of mixed electoral races, we find no evidence of female mayors being more likely to implement these policies at the local level. We do find evidence of differences between parties in the probability of implementing these policies, suggesting that the gender of the politician is less important than their partisan or ideological position when it comes to these policy levers. We interpret these results through a model of political selection in which strong parties can impose their agendas on candidates despite primitive differences in policy preferences across genders.
Annals of Regional Science, November 2022
This paper revisits the debate around the link between population density and the severity of COVID-19 spread in the United States. We do so by conducting an empirical analysis based on graphical evidence, regression analysis and instrumental variable strategies borrowed from the agglomeration literature. Studying the period between the start of the epidemic and the beginning of the vaccination campaign at the end of 2020, we find that the cross-sectional relationship between density and COVID-19 deaths changed as the year evolved. Initially, denser counties experienced more COVID-19 deaths. Yet, by December, the relationship between COVID deaths and urban density was completely flat. This is consistent with evidence indicating density affected the timing of the outbreak -- with denser locations more likely to have an early outbreak -- yet had no influence on time-adjusted COVID-19 cases and deaths. Using data from Google, Facebook, the US Census and other sources, we investigate potential mechanisms behind these findings.
- CEP Working Paper (2020)
- LSE COVID-19 Blog
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2022
This paper studies how political fragmentation affects government stability. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we show that each additional party with representation in the local parliament increases the probability that the incumbent government is unseated by 5 percentage points. The entry of an additional party affects stability by reducing the probability of a single-party majority and increasing the instability of governments when such a majority is not feasible. We interpret our results in light of a bargaining model of coalition formation featuring government instability.
- Working Paper Version
- Nada es Gratis (blog entry - in Spanish)
- Data and Code
Economia. Journal of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, Spring 2021
We study the impact of mandatory motorcycle helmet use laws on the severity and volume of road accidents in Uruguay by exploiting a change in the enforcement of the traffic law. Using a differences-in-differences design based on an unexpected change in policy, we report a sharp increase in helmet use and a 5 percentage point reduction in the incidence of serious or fatal motorcyclist accidents from a baseline of 11%. The benefits of helmet use are disproportionately borne by groups more likely to experience serious injuries such as males or young drivers. We find no evidence of other responses in terms of either the volume or type of accidents, suggesting motorcyclists' behaviour did not respond to differences in risk. We show that additional costs of enforcement for the relevant government agencies were negligible and estimate the health benefits of the policy.
Journal of the European Economic Association, June 2020
During the housing bust of 2008-2009, housing prices and transaction volumes fell across the United Kingdom.While the drop in prices was similar across housing types, transaction volumes fell more for units at the lower end of the market.I document this fact and provide panel and instrumental variable estimates showing its link with tightening credit conditions in England and Wales during 2008.I then use an overlapping-generations framework to relate the change in the composition of sales with the reduction in loan-to-value ratios by itish banks and to derive additional predictions.As down-payment requirements increase, young households with scarce financial resources are priced out by older owners who retain their previous houses as rental properties when trading up.Recent changes in aggregate housing tenure, disaggregated changes in renting, and sales in areas with different age compositions, are consistent with these predictions.The results presented here show how the composition of sales changes over the housing cycle and may inform ongoing policy discussions about reduced access to home-ownership by the young.
Journal of Urban Economics, May 2020
Several governments throughout the world apply policies aimed to re-mediate and recover vacant or idle land for other uses. This paper provides estimates of the price sensitivity of re-development, a crucial parameter for the success of these policies. My cross-sectional estimates measure how prices affect long-run conversion of unused or underused previously developed land in England. I first present a theoretical framework that links this parameter with the distribution of re-development costs and guides the empirical analysis. In order to solve the classical problem in the estimation of supply elasticities from market outcomes, I exploit school quality information and school admission boundaries to obtain a demand-shifter that is orthogonal to re-development costs. Estimation is conducted using a boundary discontinuity design based on this instrument. Results show that the probability of re-development is effectively sensitive to housing prices. Estimates indicate that a 1% increase in housing prices leads to a 0.07 percentage point reduction in the fraction of hectares containing ownfield land. Back-of-the envelope calculations using these estimates suggest that a large increase of 21% in prices across locations, or an equivalent subsidy, would be required to eliminate most of these vacant or underused land plots.
Regional Science and Urban Economics, March 2019
We study distributive politics inside cities by analysing how local governments allocate investment projects to voters across neighbourhoods. In particular, we ask whether politicians use investment to target their own supporters.To this aim, we use detailed geo-located investment data from Plan E, a large fiscal stimulus program carried out in Spain in 2009-2011. Our main empirical strategy is based on a close-elections regression-discontinuity design.In contrast to previous studies - which use aggregate data at the district or municipal level - we exploit spatial variation in both investment and voter support within municipalities and find no evidence of supporter targeting.Complementary results indicate that voters may be responding to investment by increasing turnout.
Journal of Public Economics, February 2016
We ask whether the birthplaces of Italian members of Parliament arefavoured in the allocation of central government transfers. Using apanel of municipalities for the years between 1994 and 2006, we findthat municipal governments of legislators' birth towns receive largertransfers per capita. Exploiting variation in birthplaces induced byparliamentary turnover for estimation, we find that this effect isdriven by legislators who were born in a town outside their district ofelection. As a result, we argue that our findings cannot be aconsequence of re-election incentives, the usual motivation forpork-barrel policies in the literature. Rather, politicians may bepursuing other personal motives. In line with this hypothesis, we findthat the birth town bias essentially disappears when legislativeelections are near. We explore several possible mechanisms behind ourresults by matching parliamentarians to a detailed dataset on locallevel administrators.
Work in Progress
Voter Preferences for Neighborhood Change and Political Planning Cycles (with Rosa Sanchis-Guarner )
We study how voters' attitude towards neighbourhood change shape urban planning and land use policies. Using a dynamic political selection model, we show that differences in voter preferences can lead to different paths of planning decisions across the electoral cycle. We then use information on the outcome of planning applications submitted to English local planning authorities between 2000 and 2019 to document an electoral cycle in these planning decisions. Rejection rates for major applications increase abruptly in the quarter before a local election takes place. Using insights from our selection model, we interpret this as evidence of local voter opposition to neighbourhood change. Complementary findings indicate that this opposition is entirely absent for applications that have no significant local spillovers on residents.
Tax Avoidance, Corporate Wrappers and the Housing Market. Evidence from Hong Kong (with Maggie Hu and Nikodem Szumilo)
We study the impact of tax avoidance behaviour on housing market outcomes. A new tax limiting the use of special purpose vehicles to avoid transfer taxes was introduced in the Hong Kong in 2012. Our empirical strategy combines longitudinal variation induced by this policy with cross-sectional variation in the presence of corporate buyers across sub-markets. We find that a 10 percentage-point increase in the share of these buyers in total sales increases housing prices by 6.1%. We also report that these changes affect transaction volumes and moves up and down the housing ladder. Our results show that substantial costs associated to tax avoidance practices can extend to regular market participants via pecuniary externalities.