Forests accompany the cities we build. There are an estimated 5.5 billion urban trees in the United States. Globally, about 25 percent of urban land is covered by tree canopy. This study examines urban forests as a policy tool for air pollution mitigation. We study an afforestation program in...

Urban economics has traditionally viewed cities as having advantages in production and disadvantages in consumption. We argue that the role of urban density in facilitating consumption is extremely important and understudied. As firms become more mobile, the success of cities hinges more and...

Covid-19 is the single largest threat to global public health since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-20. Was the world better prepared in 2020 than it was in 1918? After a century of public health and basic science research, pandemic response and mortality outcomes should be better than in...

Why do cities differ so much in productivity? Using a split-sample IV strategy, we document that up to three quarters of the large measured dispersion in productivity across US cities is spurious and reflects the "luck of the draw" of idiosyncratically heterogeneous plants. Due to this...

Pensions and contemporary socioeconomic change / Assar Lindbeck -- Different approaches to pension reform from an economic point of view / Jonathan Gruber, David A. Wise -- Labor mobility, redistribution, and pension reform in Europe / Alain Jousten, Pierre Pestieau -- France: the difficult path...

In this paper I explore the effect of patronage or machine' politics on government performance in American cities during the Progressive era. I use game theoretic models and an empirical analysis of spending and public goods provision during the first decade of the twentieth century in a cross...

The boundary discontinuity method of causal inference may yield misleading results if a policy's impacts do not stop at the border of the implementing jurisdiction. We use geographically precise longitudinal employment data documenting worker job-to-job mobility to study policy spillovers in the...

This paper investigates if research findings change political leaders' beliefs and cause policy change. Collaborating with the National Confederation of Municipalities in Brazil, we work with 2,150 municipalities and the mayors who control their policies. We use experiments to measure mayors'...

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning...