The macro-economic and micro-economic evidences makes a persuasive case for cities as important centers for productive efficiency, innnovation, and economic growth. For cities to achieve their full economic potential, however, complementary public services are required. This paper reviews the...

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. We also find that skilled cities are growing because they are...

The three largest cities in colonial America remain at the core of three of America's largest metropolitan areas today. This paper asks how Boston has been able to survive despite repeated periods of crisis and decline. Boston has reinvented itself three times: in the early 19th century as the...

The essay is an exploration of corruption as practiced by city politicians in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Corruption is generally considered to be bad for the performance of governments and for the growth and development of economies, but American cities grew rapidly...

The conversion of brown office buildings to green apartments can contribute towards a solution to three pressing issues: oversupply of office in a hybrid-and-remote-work world, shortage of housing, and excessive greenhouse gas emissions. We propose a set of criteria to identify commercial office...

The received economic wisdom is that cities are too big and that public policy should limit their sizes. This wisdom assumes, unrealistically, that city sites are homogeneous, migration is unfettered, land is given freely to incoming migrants, and federal taxes are neutral. Should those...

Urban change involves transformations in the physical appearance and the social composition of neighborhoods. Yet, the relationship between the physical and social components of urban change is not well understood due to the lack of comprehensive measures of neighborhood appearance. Here, we...

This review discusses frontier topics in economic geography as they relate to firms and agglomeration economies. We focus on areas where empirical research is scarce but possible. We first outline a conceptual framework for city formation that allows us to contemplate what empiricists might...

This paper surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access as well as endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A...