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Abstract
I measure the economic effects of greenbelts that prohibit new construction beyond a predefined urban fringe and therefore act as urban growth boundaries. I focus on England, where 13% of the land is designated as greenbelt land. I provide reduced-form evidence and estimate a quantitative equilibrium model that includes amenities, housing supply, a traffic congestion externality, agglomeration forces, productivity and household location choices. Greenbelt policy generates positive amenity effects, but also strongly reduces housing supply. I find that greenbelts increase welfare because amenity effects are sufficiently strong. At the same time, however, greenbelts decrease housing affordability by limiting housing supply.

Abstract
We analyse the effects of the Dutch Act on Extraordinary Measures for Urban Problems. This allows local governments to prohibit non-employed households from entering into public housing in targeted neighbourhoods to improve social mixing. We show that the Act is largely ineffective in changing the demographic composition of neighbourhoods. At the same time, due to prominent advertising of targeted deprived neighbourhoods, a stigma may have been created. We adopt a hedonic price approach and use a boundary-discontinuity (within 100 m of neighbourhood borders) to quantify the overall effect of the policy. We thus exploit spatio-temporal differences in house prices and find a sizeable price reduction of about 3–5%. The magnitude of this effect is confirmed for two other national place-based policy programmes, adding to the external validity of these findings. Our results suggest that neighbourhood stigma is important, which implies that individuals living in deprived neighbourhoods experience dis-utility from living in a place with a low status.

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.

Paper presented at Understanding Shipping Markets, International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, 24-26 June 2009 ; International audience ; Seaports are key locations within value chains and production networks. Port policies of national and local governments seek higher rents through strategies of specialisation or diversification. Elaborating on longstanding research about urban and regional development, this paper proposes an empirical investigation of the interplay between traffic variety and port performance. The analysis of traffic data per commodity for 330 European ports highlights the influence of multiple factors such as location, function, and local context, together with the specificity of some commodities regarding port evolution. The demonstrated importance of territorial factors provides a good complement to existing literature mostly focused on global networks and economic players ; L'éventail des marchandises et la performance des ports maritimes. Les ports maritimes sont des emplacements clé au sein des chaînes de valeur et des réseaux de production. Les politiques des administrations nationale et locale envers les ports visent à accroître leurs bénéfices par des stratégies de spécialisation et de diversification. Prenant appui sur certaines théories urbaines et régionales, cet article propose une étude empirique de l'interaction entre l'éventail du trafic et la performance des ports. L'analyse de 330 ports européens souligne l'influence de plusieurs facteurs, tels la localisation, la fonction et le contexte local, conjointement avec la spécificité de certaines marchandises quant au développement des ports. Ceci complète la recherche actuelle qui porte davantage sur les réseaux mondialisés et les acteurs économiques

Paper presented at Understanding Shipping Markets, International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, 24-26 June 2009 ; International audience ; Seaports are key locations within value chains and production networks. Port policies of national and local governments seek higher rents through strategies of specialisation or diversification. Elaborating on longstanding research about urban and regional development, this paper proposes an empirical investigation of the interplay between traffic variety and port performance. The analysis of traffic data per commodity for 330 European ports highlights the influence of multiple factors such as location, function, and local context, together with the specificity of some commodities regarding port evolution. The demonstrated importance of territorial factors provides a good complement to existing literature mostly focused on global networks and economic players ; L'éventail des marchandises et la performance des ports maritimes. Les ports maritimes sont des emplacements clé au sein des chaînes de valeur et des réseaux de production. Les politiques des administrations nationale et locale envers les ports visent à accroître leurs bénéfices par des stratégies de spécialisation et de diversification. Prenant appui sur certaines théories urbaines et régionales, cet article propose une étude empirique de l'interaction entre l'éventail du trafic et la performance des ports. L'analyse de 330 ports européens souligne l'influence de plusieurs facteurs, tels la localisation, la fonction et le contexte local, conjointement avec la spécificité de certaines marchandises quant au développement des ports. Ceci complète la recherche actuelle qui porte davantage sur les réseaux mondialisés et les acteurs économiques