We study the causes of "nutritional inequality": why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using event study designs exploiting supermarket entry and households' moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have meaningful effects on...

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from other geographic differences in life...

As Americans work longer in response to a changing retirement landscape, it is important to ask whether there are groups being left out of this trend. Geography is a natural lens through which to examine this question, given regional disparities in the employment of prime-age individuals. In...

We study the influence of agricultural labor intensity on individualism across U.S. counties. To measure historical labor intensity in agriculture we combine data on crop-specific labor requirements and county-specific crop mix around 1900. To address endogeneity we exploit climate-induced...

In many cities, restaurants and retail establishments are spatially concentrated. Economists have long recognized the presence of demand externalities that arise from spatial agglomeration as a possible explanation, but empirically identifying this type of spillovers has proven difficult. We...

Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city--defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide estimates of the standard of living by commuting zone for...

In this paper we characterize the set of equilibria in a generalized version of the canonical two-region economic geography model that nests the class of models in Allen and Arkolakis (2014) as well as Krugman (1991). We show that the set of (regular) equilibria corresponds to the set of zeros...