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 empirically investigate the impact of COVID-19 shutdowns on domestic violence using incident-level data on both domestic-related calls for service and crime reports of domestic violence assaults from the 18 major US police departments for which both types of records are available. Although we...

We use spatially disaggregated daily crime data for the City of Los Angeles to measure the impact of heat and pollution on crime and to study how this relationship varies across the city. On average, overall crime increases by 2.2% and violent crime by 5.7% on days with maximum daily...

We investigate the relationship between the extent of a city's subway network, its population and its spatial configuration. For the 632 largest cities in the world we construct panel data describing population, measures of centralization calculated from lights at night data, and the extent of...

The standard revealed-preference estimate of a city's quality of life is proportional to that city's cost-of-living relative to its wage-level. Adjusting estimates to account for federal taxes, non-housing costs, and non-labor income produces more plausible quality-of-life estimates than in the...

Differences in house price and income growth rates between 1950 and 2000 across metropolitan areas have led to an ever-widening gap in housing values and incomes between the typical and highest-priced locations. We show that the growing spatial skewness in house prices and incomes are related...

We document several empirical regularities regarding the evolution of urban structure in the largest U.S. metropolitan areas over the period 1980-1990. These regularities relate to changes in resident population, employment, occupations, as well as the number and size of establishments in...

We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the...

Over the past 30 years, the share of adult populations with college degrees increased more in cities with higher initial schooling levels than in initially less educated places. This tendency appears to be driven by shifts in labor demand as there is an increasing wage premium for skilled people...

New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation's premier metropolis. What accounts for New York's rise and continuing success? The rise of New York in the early nineteenth century is the result of technological changes...