We contrast equilibrium and welfare analysis in the rental housing market under two property rights regimes – eviction rights and security of tenure – when tenants face moving costs. A tenant’s idiosyncratic benefit from his unit and a landlord’s idiosyncratic profit from conversion are...

How should the size and number of cities evolve optimally as population grows? Stripped of the constraints of geography itself, the setup of the New Economic Geography implies that de-agglomeration (or de- urbanization) is efficient. The number of cities increases while the size of each...

The industrial diversification of cities is explained without imposing linkages among industries. In each of two city-industries, a manufacture is produced competitively as the final good using labor and industry- specific differentiated services. Manufacturers import the services of their...

Using an urban land use model in which jobs and residences are spatially dispersed and mixed, we treat the general equilibrium of land, labor and product markets and the trade-off between labor supply, commuting and discretionary travel. We show that the decentralization of population and of...

Throughout history cities have contained separate areas where ethnic groups are concentrated. In the U.S. many older cities in the Northeast and Midwest contain large African-American ghettos. We discuss the causes and consequences of ethnic and racial segregation. We identify differences...

Henry George’s single tax on land is an elusive concept to implement, because land is occupied by a variety of buildings or is undeveloped. Land value is undefined since the value of the land lying under buildings is difficult to estimate and does not correspond to real market value....