Using a newly constructed data panel on U.S. locality attributes, this paper sketches four sets of empirical facts on economic growth across U.S. counties. A first set of facts focuses on the time series and cross-correlation properties of local economic growth as measured by net migration, per...

The expansion of Federal Housing Administration lending has let households with imperfect credit or the inability to make a large down payment maintain access to mortgage borrowing. Rather than excluding such households, lenders have been applying strict underwriting conditions on all borrowers....

Population density varies widely across US cities. A simple, static general equilibrium model suggests that moderate-sized differences in cities' total factor productivity can account for such variation. Nevertheless, the productivity required to sustain above-average population densities...

Following World War II, many large U.S. cities began to rapidly lose population. This urban decline climaxed during the 1970s when New York City, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Atlanta each lost more than 10 percent of their population. The sharp declines of these and numerous other U.S....

From 1971 through mid-2007, the nominal national sales price of housing grew almost eightfold. Controlling for inflation, this represented a near doubling in the relative price of housing. The retrenchment in prices that began in 2007 has so far remained small compared to the earlier increase. ;...

In an electoral framework of unidimensional two-candidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting, special interest groups present candidates with schedules that give the level of campaign contribution they will make for each feasible candidate policy location. Candidates, motivated by the...

Households in the United States and a number of other wealthy nations have been migrating to places with nice weather. This likely reflects an increase in the relative valuation of the weather's direct contribution to household utility. Several different amenity explanations are discussed that...

More than 19 percent of people in American central cities are poor. In suburbs, just 7.5 percent of people live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to come from wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap (the traditional explanation of...