We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city's subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. For the 632 largest cities in the world we construct panel data describing population, measures of centralization calculated from lights at night data, and the extent of...

Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...

Medellin's government wanted to raise its efficacy, legitimacy, and control. The city identified 80 neighborhoods with weak state presence and competing armed actors. In half, they increased non-police street presence tenfold for two years, offering social services and dispute resolution. In...

Historically, urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire. But there has been an explosion of poor mega-cities over the last thirty years. A simple urban model illustrates that in closed...

Between 1900 and 1930 typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases were largely eradicated from U.S. cities. This achievement required a mix of technological, scientific, economic, and bureaucratic innovations. This article examines how the interaction of those forces influenced water and...

U.S. cities invested heavily in water and sewer infrastructure throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These investments improved public health and quality of life by helping U.S. cities control typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases. We show that segregated cities invested in...

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation...

Many of the world's largest cities are now in developing countries. We develop a simple theoretical model, inspired by the case of Mexico, that explains the existence of such giant cities as a consequence of the strong forward and backward linkages that arise when manufacturing tries to serve a...

This paper considers a largely unknown public-health practice in the United States: the use of lead pipes to distribute household tap water. Municipalities first installed lead pipes during the late nineteenth century. In 1897, about half of all American municipalities used lead water pipes....

Nearly 40% of England's privately built waterworks were municipalised in the late 19th century. We examine how this affected public health by pairing annual mortality data for over 600 registration districts, spanning 1869 to 1910, with detailed waterworks information. Identification is aided by...