Current sources of data on rental housing – such as the census or commercial databases that focus on large apartment complexes – do not reflect recent market activity or the full scope of the U.S. rental market. To address this gap, we collected, cleaned, analyzed, mapped, and visualized 11...

High growth and progressive regions possess a culture that promotes innovation. Innovation depends on a region’s ability to use its own existing knowledge and knowledge generated elsewhere. This paper demonstrates the importance of the ability to absorb external knowledge in explaining...

Social interactions are considered pivotal to agglomeration economies. We explore a unique dataset on mobile phone calls to examine how distance and population density shape the structure of social interactions. Exploiting an exogenous change in travel times, we show that distance is highly...

Mere observation of others' choices can be informative about product quality. This paper develops an individual-level dynamic model of observational learning, and applies it to a novel data set from the U.S. kidney market where transplant candidates on a waiting list sequentially decide whether...

This research report from the Milken Institute ranks U.S. metropolitan areas that are recording the top economic performance and creating the most jobs in the nation. The index is an outcomes-based measure as opposed to one that incorporates explicit measures of business costs, cost-of-living...

We propose a theory of skill mobility across cities. It predicts the well documented city size-wage premium: the wage distribution in large cities first-order stochastically dominates that in small cities. Yet, because this premium is reflected in higher house prices, this does not necessarily...

In this paper, we examine the effects of changes in property tax rates and school spending on residential and business property value growth in southeast Michigan. We use panel data for 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit between the years 1983 and 2002, a period during...

This paper studies regional output asymmetries following U.S. federal tax shocks. We estimate a vector autoregressive model for each U.S. state, utilizing the exogenous tax shock series recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010) and find considerable variations: estimated output multipliers lie...

We characterize the dynamics of relative house prices, construction rates and population growth across US cities. In response to fluctuations in relative incomes, we find that population growth rates adjust more rapidly than construction rates in the short run and that price appreciation...

We present a hedonic framework to estimate U.S. households' preferences over local climates, using detailed weather and 2000 Census data. We find that Americans favor an average daily temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit, will pay more on the margin to avoid excess heat than cold, and are not...