Negative demand shocks have afflicted many American cities in the 20th century and are the main explanation for their decaying housing markets. But what is the role of housing supply? Rational entrepreneurs should not invest in new buildings and renovation when home values are below replacement...

For more than a century, educated cities have grown more quickly than comparable cities with less human capital. This fact survives a battery of other control variables, metropolitan area fixed effects, and tests for reverse causality. The authors also find that skilled cities are growing...

Does speaking a foreign language have an impact on earnings? The authors use a variety of empirical strategies to address this issue for a representative sample of U.S. college graduates. OLS regressions with a complete set of controls to minimize concerns about omitted variable biases,...

The authors develop a legal contract enforcement theory of the own versus lease decision. The allocation of ownership rights will minimize enforcement costs when the legal system is inefficient. In particular, when legal enforcement of contracts is costly, there will be a shift from arrangements...

The City Beautiful movement, which in the early 20th century advocated city beautification as a way to improve the living conditions and civic virtues of the urban dweller, had languished by the Great Depression. Today, new urban economic theorists and policymakers are coming to see the...

Are dictatorships more prone to build and maintain roads? This paper identifies a puzzling fact: countries that are more democratic tend to have roads in worse conditions than less democratic countries. Using lagged values of a democracy index to instrument for democracy in 1980 yields higher...

What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, the authors find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. They propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or...

Is there a local economic impact of immigration? Immigration pushes up rents and housing values in destination cities. The positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas. The author uses instrumental variables based on a...

The authors investigate the impact of the tax treatment of owner-occupied housing on urban form in an economy in which high- and low-income households choose among city and suburban communities. Because housing tax policies differentially affect the relative, after-tax price of housing for high-...