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...

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...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue....

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 it...

We study the role of distance and time in statistically explaining price dispersion for 14 commodities from 1732 to 1860. The prices are reported for US cities and Swedish market towns, so we can compare international and intranational dispersion. Distance and commodity-specific fixed effects...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We follow the recent sociology literature and interpret culture as a \repertoire", which allows rich cultural responses to changes in the environment and shifts in political power. Specifically, we...

In 1956, 52% of urban men and 42% of rural men smoked cigarettes. By 2010, the disparity had flipped: 24.7% of urban men and 30.6% of rural men smoked. Smoking remains the greatest preventable cause of mortality in the United States, and understanding the underlying causes of place-specific...

Buenos Aires and Chicago grew during the nineteenth century for remarkably similar reasons. Both cities were conduits for moving meat and grain from fertile hinterlands to eastern markets. However, despite their initial similarities, Chicago was vastly more prosperous for most of the 20th...

The economic approach to cities relies on a spatial equilibrium for workers, employers and builders. The worker's equilibrium implies that positive attributes in one location, like access to downtown or high wages, are offset by negative attributes, like high housing prices. The employer's...

There are persistent differences in self-reported subjective well-being across U.S. metropolitan areas, and residents of declining cities appear less happy than other Americans. Newer residents of these cities appear to be as unhappy as longer term residents, and yet some people continue to move...