In this paper, the authors document a pronounced trend toward deconcentration of metropolitan employment during the postwar period in the United States. The employment share of initially more dense metro areas declined and those of initially less dense metro areas rose. Motivated by this...

In this study the authors show that during the postwar era, the United States experienced a decline in the share of urban employment accounted for by the relatively dense metropolitan areas and a corresponding rise in the share of relatively less dense ones. This trend, which the authors call...

In this paper, the authors document that the disparity in employment densities across U.S. metropolitan areas has lessened substantially over the postwar period. To account for this deconcentration of metropolitan employment, the authors develop a system-of-cities model in which an increase in...

A key finding to emerge from this study is that the widely studied suburbanization or decentralization of employment and population is only part of the story of postwar urban evolution. Another important part of the story is a postwar trend of relatively faster growth of jobs and people in the...

Economists, beginning with Alfred Marshall, have studied the significance of cities in the production and exploitation of information externalities that, today, we call knowledge spillovers. This paper presents robust evidence of those effects. We show that patent intensity—the per capita...

This paper examines the role local labor markets play in the production of innovations. The authors appeal to a labor market matching model (á la Berliant, Reed, and Wang 2004) to argue that in dense urban areas, workers are more selective in their matches and are therefore more productive....

We present a model of long-duration collateralized debt with risk of default. Applied to the housing market, it can match the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate, and the lower tail of the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners prior to the recent crisis. We stress the...

This paper is superseded by WP 15-15 <p>The authors construct a quantitative equilibrium model of the housing market in which an unanticipated increase in the supply of housing triggers default mortgages via its effect on house prices. The decline in house prices creates an incentive to increase...</p>

Participants in student loan programs must repay loans in full regardless of whether they complete college. But many students who take out a loan do not earn a degree (the dropout rate among college students is between 33 to 50 percent). The authors examine whether insurance against...

The authors construct a quantitative equilibrium model of the housing sector that accounts for the homeownership rate, the average foreclosure rate, and the distribution of home-equity ratios across homeowners prior to the recent boom and bust in the housing market. They analyze the key...