During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms increased by more than a third—100 million acres—and almost 50 million acres, an area almost equal to that of the states of Indiana and Ohio combined, were converted from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of...

How does the spatial distribution of employment opportunities influence residential location? We revisit this classic question in urban economics by exploiting a natural experiment generated by the history of state capitals. Many state employees in capital cities work in centrally located...

We present estimates of home ownership for African American and white households from 1870 to 2007. These estimates, which pertain to a core sample of households headed by adult men, update and extend an earlier paper’s analysis (William J. Collins and Robert A. Margo 2001) with figures for...

Between 1940 and 1980, the rate of homeownership among African-American households increased by close to 40 percentage points. Most of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership was facilitated by the filtering of the urban housing stock as white households...

Written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review, this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its members, one of which is the...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] The de Finetti Theorem is a cornerstone of the Bayesian approach. Bernardo (1996) writes that its "message is very clear: if a sequence of observations is judged to be exchangeable, then any subset of them must...

This paper presents a search model of centralized and decentralized trade. In a centralized market, trades are intermediated by market makers at publicly posted bid–ask prices. In a decentralized market, traders search counterparties. Prices are negotiated and transactions are conducted in...

State-dependent pricing (SDP) models treat the timing of price changes as a profit-maximizing choice, symmetrically with other decisions of firms. Using quantitative general equilibrium models that incorporate a “generalized (S,s) approach,” we investigate the implications of SDP for topics...