This paper estimates the impact of new road infrastructure on employment and labour productivity using firm level longitudinal data for Britain. Exposure to transport improvements is measured through changes in accessibility, calculated at a detailed geographical scale from changes in minimum journey times along the road network. These changes are induced by the construction of new road link schemes. We deal with the potential endogeneity of scheme location by identifying the effects of changes in accessibility from variation across small-scale geographical areas close to the scheme. We find substantial positive effects on area level employment and number of establishments. For existing establishments we find increases in output per worker, wages and use of intermediate inputs. A plausible interpretation is that new transport infrastructure attracts transport intensive establishments to an area, and also leads to some reorganization of production in existing businesses.

We often talk about ‘Town Centres’ (TCs), but defining their location and extent is surprisingly difficult. Their boundaries are hard to pin down and intrinsically fuzzy. Nevertheless, policymakers often speak or act as if their definition was self-evident. The Dutch and later the British governments, for example, introduced very specific policies for them without ever clearly defining what or where they were. In this article, we propose a simple methodology to predict TC boundaries and extent. Using a range of micro-geographical data, we test our method for the whole of Great Britain in an attempt to capture all the dimensions of ‘town centredness’ in a 3D surface. We believe this is a contribution in its own right but is also an essential step if there is to be any rigorous analysis of TC or evaluation of policies directed at them. Our method should contribute to improve not just debates about cities, shopping hierarchies, and TCs but also to other more general debates where people and policy proceed ahead of any clear definition of what are the objects of interest.

How does an increase in immigrant inflows affect housing demand and prices for a given housing supply? In this paper, I show that we can formally decompose total demand changes into those from the immediate increase in population due to the new arrivals (the “partial effect”) and additional changes from relocated natives (the “induced effect”). I propose and apply a method to estimate these effects separately, exploiting data for Spain between 2001 and 2012. Using an instrumental variables strategy, I find that a one percentage point increase in the immigration rate raises average house sale prices by 3.3%. Partial demand estimates are 24% lower than total estimates due to immigrants and natives locating in the same provinces. The results show that accounting for the impact of immigration on native mobility is central to understanding net demand adjustments, as partial and total effects can significantly differ depending on native population relocation.