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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.