We analyze changes in pedestrian behavior over a 30-year period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Building on William Whyte's observational work from 1980, where he manually recorded pedestrian behaviors, we employ computer vision and deep learning...

We document a Kuznets curve for construction productivity in 20th-century America. Homes built per construction worker remained stagnant between 1900 and 1940, boomed after World War II, and then plummeted after 1970. The productivity boom from 1940 to 1970 shows that nothing makes technological...

Public capacity complements urban density because externalities abound in cities and urban scale makes it possible to share infrastructure that needs to be managed. Yet, urban governments face limitations that are not experienced by private sector entities. A city cannot just stop policing if it...

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...

This paper uses decennial Census data to examine trends in immigrant segregation in the United States between 1910 and 2000. Immigrant segregation declined in the first half of the century, but has been rising over the past few decades. Analysis of restricted access 1990 Census microdata...

Americans average 25.1 working hours per person in working age per week, but the Germans average 18.6 hours. The average American works 46.2 weeks per year, while the French average 40 weeks per year. Why do western Europeans work so much less than Americans? Recent work argues that these...

Since 1950, housing prices have risen regularly by almost two percent per year. Between 1950 and 1970, this increase reflects rising housing quality and construction costs. Since 1970, this increase reflects the increasing difficulty of obtaining regulatory approval for building new homes. In...

Cities are physical structures, but the modern literature on urban economic development rarely acknowledges that fact. The elasticity of housing supply helps determine the extent to which increases in productivity will create bigger cities or just higher paid workers and more expensive homes. In...

Party platforms differ sharply from one another, especially on issues with religious content, such as abortion or gay marriage. Religious extremism in the U.S. appears to be strategically targeted to win elections, since party platforms diverge significantly, while policy outcomes like abortion...