This essay both advocates and presents the research agenda for an interdisciplinary approach to a social science of empire, using, as its springboard, the review of four new books offered by three US publishers, linked in an endeavor called the “American Empire Project.†It begins with...

Many Rust-Belt cities have seen almost half their populations move from inside the city borders to the surrounding suburbs and elsewhere since the 1970s. As populations shifted, neighborhoods changed—in their average income, educational profile, and housing prices. But the shift did not happen...

An explanation of how regional wage and rent differentials can be used to classify metropolitan areas according to their amenity and productivity characteristics.

An exploration of why workers in large cities are more highly paid than their rural counterparts. The authors decompose city-size wage differentials into the portion due to worker traits and the portion due to intercity differences in wage structures and find that differences in worker-attribute...

We end with the age-old debate of city vs. suburbs. The United States is unique in its commitment to local government as the primary provider of essential public services and in its use of local taxes as the primary means for paying for these services. The Philadelphia metropolitan area is...

We use new disaggregated data on consumer prices to determine why there is variability in prices of similar goods across U.S. cities. We address questions similar to those that have arisen in the international context: is this variability purely a result of market segmentation or do sticky...

The September 11 attacks in New York and Washington have forced Americans to confront the fact that to live or work in a large city is to be at greater risk of large-scale terrorism. What do these risks, and the public perception of them, imply for cities in general and the future of New York...