Cities with relatively high poverty rates remain high-cost places in which to live and work, even with hundreds of billions of dollars in means-tested monetary and in-kind transfers flowing annually to their poorer residents. Consequently, place-based aid to jurisdictions is needed to eliminate...

Historically, urban growth required enough development to grow and transport significant agricultural surpluses or a government effective enough to build an empire. But there has been an explosion of poor mega-cities over the last thirty years. A simple urban model illustrates that in closed...

New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when...