Recent literature on the relationship between ethnic or racial segregation and outcomes has failed to produce a consensus view of the role of ghettos; some studies suggest that residence in an enclave is beneficial, some reach the opposite conclusion, and still others imply that any relationship...

Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these...

This paper discusses the prevalence of Silicon Valley-style localizations of individual manufacturing industries in the United States. Several models in which firms choose locations by throwing darts at a map are used to test whether the degree of localization is greater than would be expected...

How effective are restrictions on mobility in limiting COVID-19 spread? Using zip code data across five U.S. cities, we estimate that total cases per capita decrease by 20% for every ten percentage point fall in mobility. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we instrument for travel by residential...

Are the well-known facts about urbanization in the United States also true for the developing world? We compare American metropolitan areas with comparable geographic units in Brazil, China and India. Both Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law seem to hold as well in Brazil as in the U.S., but China and...

The 1990s were an unusually good decade for the largest American cities and, in particular, for the cities of the Midwest. However, fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during the prior post-war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three...

There are many possible ways of reforming the Government-Sponsored Enterprises that insure mortgages against default, including a purely public option, complete privatization or a hybrid model with private firms and public catastrophic insurance. If the government is sufficiently capable and...

Why are public-sector workers so heavily compensated with pensions and other non-pecuniary benefits? In this paper, we present a political economy model of shrouded compensation in which politicians compete for taxpayers' and public employees' votes by promising compensation packages, but some...