This article examines unemployment disparities and efficiency in a densely populated economy with two job centers and workers distributed between them. We introduce commuting costs and search-matching frictions to deal with the spatial mismatch between workers and firms. In equilibrium, there...

We investigate whether the COVID-19 pandemic decreased the willingness to pay for urban amenities such as restaurants, cinemas and theaters. We do this by using a hedonic pricing model in combination with a time-gradient difference-in-difference approach. We use a data set that contains...

Place-based attachments are important but often overlooked. Place-based attachments can be beneficial but often harm individuals tied to struggling areas. In this address, I discuss my own education and migration experiences and then more generally discuss sense of belonging as a friction to...

This paper uses a new field survey of low-wage areas of urban India to show that employment and earnings were decimated by the lockdown resulting from the Covid-19 crisis. It examines workers' desire for a job guarantee in this setting. Workers who had a job guarantee before the crisis were...

In a city where individuals endogenously choose their residential location, firms determine their spatial efficiency wage and a geographical red line beyond which they do not recruit workers. This is because workers experiencing longer commuting trips provide lower effort levels than those...

We develop a model where workers both choose their residential location (geographical space) and their social interactions (social space). In equilibrium, we show under which condition some individuals reside close to the job center while others live far away from it. Even though the two...

Disadvantaged communities are often geographically segregated from employment and higher education opportunities. Increasing access can entail substantial welfare gains, but this can also affect the tradeoff faced by young adults between investing in higher education and working for pay. We...

This study proposes new family-centered measures of access to early care and education (ECE) services with respect to quantity, cost, and quality and uses them to assess disparities in access across locations and socio-demographic groups in Minnesota. These measures are distance-based and use...

We document externalities of the civic unrest experienced in Ferguson, MO following the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control method estimates compare Ferguson-area schools to neighboring schools in the greater St. Louis area and find that...

This paper examines the effects of county-level urbanization and natural amenities on subjective well-being (SWB) in the U.S. SWB is measured using individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) which asks respondents to rate their overall life satisfaction....