The geographical location of economic activity within the United States has important implications for carbon mitigation. If households clustered in California's cities rather than in more humid southern cities such as Memphis and Houston, then the average household carbon footprint would be...

The spatial mismatch hypothesis posits that employment decentralization isolated urban blacks from work opportunities. This paper focuses on one large employer that has remained in the central city over the twentieth century - the U.S. Postal Service. We find that blacks substitute towards...

This paper studies the impacts of work-from-home (WFH) in the housing market from both intercity and intracity perspectives. Our results confirm the theoretical prediction that WFH puts downward pressure on housing prices and rents in high-productivity counties, a result of workers starting to...

This paper presents an analysis of the longer-run effects of a college-preparatory program implemented in inner-city schools that provided teacher training in addition to payments to eleventh- and twelfth- grade students and their teachers for passing scores on Advanced Placement (AP) exams....

We propose a theory-inspired measure of the accessibility of a city's center: the size of the surrounding area from which it can be reached within a specific time. Using publicly available optimal-routing software, we compute these "accessibility zones" for the 109 largest US and European...

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...

More than 17 percent of households in American central cities live in poverty; in American suburbs, just 7.4 percent of households live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to be the result of wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap...

This article reviews recent literature using insights from history to answer central questions in urban economics. This area of research has seen rapid growth in the past decade, thanks to new technologies that have made available increasingly rich data stretching far back in time. The focus is...

In 1956, 52% of urban men and 42% of rural men smoked cigarettes. By 2010, the disparity had flipped: 24.7% of urban men and 30.6% of rural men smoked. Smoking remains the greatest preventable cause of mortality in the United States, and understanding the underlying causes of place-specific...

Urban density boosts productivity and innovation, improves access to goods and services, reduces typical travel distances, encourages energy-efficient construction and transport, and facilitates sharing scarce amenities. However, density is also synonymous with crowding, makes living and moving...