A key reason for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During Covid, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. We document how cities changed during Covid and consider how the persistence of...

This paper uses transaction-level data across millions of accounts to identify cryptocurrency investors and evaluate how fluctuations in individual crypto wealth affect household consumption, equity investment, and local real estate markets. We estimate an MPC out of unrealized crypto gains that...

We study a difference-in-differences (DiD) framework where groups experience unequal treatment statuses in the pre-policy change period. This approach is commonly employed in empirical studies but it contradicts the canonical model's assumptions. We show that in such settings, the standard DiD...

We study two-way-fixed-effects regressions (TWFE) with several treatment variables. Under a parallel trends assumption, we show that the coefficient on each treatment identifies a weighted sum of that treatment's effect, with possibly negative weights, plus a weighted sum of the effects of the...

Standard methods for estimating production functions in the Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition require assumptions on input choices. We introduce a new method that exploits (increasingly available) data on a firm's expectations of its future output and inputs that allows us to obtain consistent...

We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related...

A busy airport's closure has large effects on noise, real estate markets, and neighborhood demographics. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver's Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but...

We document the existence of a racial gap in realized housing returns that is an order of magnitude larger than disparities arising from housing costs alone, and is driven almost entirely by differences in distressed home sales (i.e. foreclosures and short sales). Black and Hispanic homeowners...

With "2020 hindsight," the 2000s housing cycle is not a boom-bust but rather a boom- bust-rebound at both the national level and across cities. We argue this pattern reflects a larger role for fundamentally-rooted explanations than previously thought. We construct a city-level long-run...

By constraining an individual's choice during a search, housing discrimination distorts sorting decisions away from true preferences and results in a ceteris paribus reduction in welfare. This study combines a large-scale field experiment with a residential sorting model to derive...