This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific...

We study the aftermath of the 1968 Washington, DC civil disturbance to illuminate the mechanisms that drive urban redevelopment in the presence of low demand and racial tension. After establishing that civil disturbance property destruction was quasi-random within blocks, we show that destroyed...

During the Second Industrial Revolution, in the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of automation technologies coincided with substantial job creation but also a "hollowing out" of middle-skilled job opportunities, which historically offered reliable paths to prosperity. We use recently...

This paper studies the level and the causes of earnings inequality in late nineteenth century America and Britain using microdata from the United States Commissioner of Labor Survey in 1890 and 1891. We examine whether lessons from studies on changes in earnings inequality over time -- the...

The United States in the 19th century was marked by initially quite high fertility levels but also by the onset of a relatively early and steep decline in fertility. Most of what we know about these patterns in the US comes from aggregate (typically county or state level) data. We provide new,...

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. Such processes are subject to persistent random shocks stemming from agents’ maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term —logit...

The member states of the European Union received 1.2 million first time asylum applications in 2015 (a doubling compared to 2014). Even if asylum will be granted for many of the refugees that made the journey to Europe, several obstacles for successful integration remain. This paper focuses on...

In this paper, we apply the theory of rational expectation bubbles to the Chinese house market. Rational expectation bubbles imply that negative returns on house prices are, theoretically, less likely to occur if the bubbles exist and persist. Based on the data of 29 cities in China, we find no...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall, and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. This paper assesses the magnitude of the impact of housing...

In a recent set of influential papers, researchers have argued that residential mortgage foreclosures reduce the sale prices of nearby properties. We revisit this issue using a more robust identification strategy combined with new data that contain information on the location of properties...