Showing 1 - 10 of 141
New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013010715
Amenities that vary across cities are typically valued using either a hedonic model, in which amenities are capitalized into wages and housing prices, or a discrete model of household location choice. In this paper, we use the 2000 Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) to value climate amenities...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012919134
In the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a substantial mortality 'penalty' to living in urban places. This circumstance was shared with other nations. By around 1940, this penalty had been largely eliminated, and it was healthier, in many cases, to reside in the city...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013125132
GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013151806
Covid-19 is the single largest threat to global public health since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-20. Was the world better prepared in 2020 than it was in 1918? After a century of public health and basic science research, pandemic response and mortality outcomes should be better than in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012834466
In the context of interwar Poland, we find that Jews tended to be more literate than non Jews, but show that this finding is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012841412
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...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012788067
In the first half of the twentieth century, the rate of death from infectious disease in the United States fell precipitously. Although this decline is well-known and well-documented, there is surprisingly little evidence about whether it took place uniformly across the regions of the U.S. We...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012906773
Cities in the United States dramatically expanded spending on public education in the years following World War I, with the average urban school district increasing per pupil expenditures by over 70 percent between 1916 and 1924. We provide the first evaluation of these historically...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012890472
We study the causes and consequences of patronage in Brazilian cities since the country's re-democratization. We test key mechanisms – fiscal rules, accountability, political ideology, and rent-seeking – and estimate the consequences of patronage for public finances. Our data consist of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012893592