Urban change involves transformations in the physical appearance and the social composition of neighborhoods. Yet, the relationship between the physical and social components of urban change is not well understood due to the lack of comprehensive measures of neighborhood appearance. Here, we...

This paper examines city formation in a country whose urban population is growing steadily over time, with new cities required to accommodate this growth. In contrast to most of the literature there is immobility of housing and urban infrastructure, and investment in these assets is taken on the...

A key reason for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During Covid, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. We document how cities changed during Covid and consider how the persistence of...

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the...

The received economic wisdom is that cities are too big and that public policy should limit their sizes. This wisdom assumes, unrealistically, that city sites are homogeneous, migration is unfettered, land is given freely to incoming migrants, and federal taxes are neutral. Should those...

People continue to live in many big American cities, because in those cities housing costs less than new construction. While cities may lose their productive edge, their houses remain and population falls only when housing depreciates. This paper presents a simple durable housing model of urban...

Equity in housing is a major component of household wealth in the United States. Steady gains in housing prices over the last several decades have generated large potential gains in household wealth among homeowners. Mankiw and Weil (1989) and McFadden (1993b) have argued that the aging of the...

Real house prices are directly determined by the willingness of households to pay for (and willingness of builders to supply) a constant-quality house. Changes in the quantity of housing demanded will affect real prices only to the extent that the long-run housing supply schedule is positively...

The United States transformed itself from a rural to an urban society over the last three centuries. After a century of unremarkable growth, the pace of urbanization was historically unprecedented between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the twentieth century, the urban...

Will COVID-19 end the urban renaissance that many cities have experienced since the 1980s? This essay selectively reviews the copious literature that now exists on the long-term impact of natural disasters. At this point, the long-run resilience of cities to many forms of physical destruction,...