Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers following economic shocks helps to facilitate local labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine the role that immigration may have played in enabling U.S. commuting...

This paper identifies which investments in school facilities help students and are valued by homeowners. Using novel data on school district bonds, test scores, and house prices for 29 U.S. states and a research design that exploits close elections with staggered timing, we show that increased...

What explains record U.S. house price growth since late 2019? We show that the shift to remote work explains over one half of the 23.8 percent national house price increase over this period. Using variation in remote work exposure across U.S. metropolitan areas we estimate that an additional...

Modern metropolitan areas involve large concentrations of economic activity and the transport of millions of people each day between their residence and workplace. We use the revolution in transport technology from the invention of steam railways, newly-constructed spatially-disaggregated data...

Why do levels of entrepreneurship differ across America's cities? This paper presents basic facts on two measures of entrepreneurship: the self-employment rate and the number of small firms. Both of these measures are correlated with urban success, suggesting that more entrepreneurial cities are...

Using monthly data from major U.S. metropolitan areas that span state borders, we estimate the elasticity of employment with respect to the minimum wage using a difference-in-differences design with continuous treatment in two-digit industries of 71 (Arts, Entertainment and Recreation) and 72...

Using newly digitized data on the growth of the telegraph network in America during 1840-1852, the paper studies the impacts of the electric telegraph on national elections. I use proximity to daily newspapers with telegraphic connections to Washington to generate plausibly exogenous variation...

We study the effects of the unionization of faculty at Canadian universities from 1970-2022 using an event-study design. Using administrative data which covers the full universe of faculty salaries, we find strong evidence that unionization leads to both average salary gains and compression of...

By how much does an extension of unemployment benefits affect macroeconomic outcomes such as unemployment? Answering this question is challenging because U.S. law extends benefits for states experiencing high unemployment. We use data revisions to decompose the variation in the duration of...

Job loss comes with large present value earnings losses which elude workhorse models of unemployment and labor market policy. I propose a parsimonious model of a frictional labor market in which jobs differ in terms of unemployment risk and workers search off- and on-the-job. This gives rise to...