The downsides of density, including traffic congestion, contagious disease and crime, were common in Victorian London and classical Rome, just as they are today in Sao Paulo and Lagos. Our urban past provides lessons for developing world cities today. The first lesson, that I highlight, is that...

We investigate the effects of sewer access on neighborhood characteristics in developing world cities. Because it is more difficult to move sewage uphill than downhill, otherwise similar neighborhoods on opposite sides of drainage basin divides may face different costs of sewer access. We...

Urban flooding poses danger to people and places. People can adapt to this risk by moving to safer areas or by investing in private self-protection. Places can offset some of the risk through urban planning and infrastructure investment. By constructing a global city data set that covers the...

Most hospitals and managed care organizations have financial assistance programs that aim to reduce financial burdens and improve health care access for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization....

Air pollution is known to negatively affect a range of health outcomes. Wildfire smoke is an increasingly important contributor to air pollution, yet extreme smoke events are highly salient and could induce behavioral responses that alter health impacts. We combine geolocated data covering the...

Due to population aging, GDP growth per capita and GDP growth per working-age adult have become quite different among many advanced economies over the last several decades. Countries whose GDP growth per capita performance has been lackluster, like Japan, have done surprisingly well in terms of...

We investigate the source, magnitude, and unevenness of the procyclical forces that shape labor force participation, i.e., the participation cycle, which are important for the implementation of the maximum employment mandate. We show that these forces can be analyzed in real time using a flow...

This paper estimates the magnitude and distribution of surplus from the knowledge worker gig economy using data from an online labor market. Labor demand elasticities determine workers' wages, and buyers' past market experience shapes both their job posting frequency and hiring rates. We find...

We examine whether medical innovation can reinforce existing health disparities by disproportionately benefiting socioeconomically advantaged patients. The reason is that less advantaged patients often do not use new medications. This may be due to high costs of new drugs, but could also reflect...