This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applicants to the EZ program as controls, we find...

We use a simple theory of a system of cities to decompose the determinants of the city size distribution into three main components: efficiency, amenities, and frictions. Higher efficiency and better amenities lead to larger cities but also to greater frictions through congestion and other...

We present a theory of spatial development. Manufacturing and services firms located in a continuous geographic area choose each period how much to innovate. Firms trade subject to transport costs and technology diffuses spatially. We apply the model to study the evolution of the US economy in...

This paper develops microfoundations for the role that diversified cities play in fostering innovation. A simple model of process innovation is proposed, where firms learn about their ideal production process by making prototypes. We build around this a dynamic general-equilibrium model, and...

Dating to the classic works of Alonso, Mills, and Muth, the production function for housing has played a central role in urban economics and local public finance. This paper provides a new flexible approach for estimating the housing production function which treats housing quantities and prices...

Has government spending raised income and employment since 2008? I use new data on state pension returns during the Great Recession to recover exogenous changes in spending. Instrumenting with these return shocks, I estimate that each dollar of windfall-financed spending raised local incomes by...