The U.S. residential housing market collapse illustrates the consequences of ignoring risk while funding mortgage borrowing. Collateral over-valuation was a foundational piece of the crisis. Over the past few decades, secondary markets, securitization, policy and psychology increased the flow of...

The U.S. economic development in the nineteenth century was characterized by the westward movement of population and the accumulation of productive land in the West. This paper presents a model of migration and land improvement to identify the quantitatively important forces driving this...

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...

There was a time in America when African American educators in public grade schools were intricately connected to their students through community organizations. African American educators lived in the same neighborhoods as their students, attended the same churches and participated in similar...

This paper focuses on the Internet, as a resource in the fulfillment of companies' needs to lease or buy office space in the U.S. A measure of this Internet use is introduced by two indexes considering the companies' preferences and the office stock in U.S. states and cities. The results...

How does interconnectedness affect the course of a pandemic? What are the optimal withinand between-state containment policies? We embed a spatial SIR model into a multi-sector quantitative trade model. We calibrate it to US states and the COVID-19 pandemic and find that interconnectedness...

Risky health behaviors such as smoking, drinking alcohol, drug use, unprotected sex, and poor diets and sedentary lifestyles (leading to obesity) are a major source of preventable deaths. This chapter overviews the theoretical frameworks for, and empirical evidence on, the economics of risky...

Economics has long studied how consumers respond to the disclosure of information about firms. We study a case in which the disclosed information is unrelated to the product or firm leadership, but which could still potentially affect consumer patronage through the mechanism of repugnance, as...

Organizational change has become the norm rather than the exception among U.S. hospitals. Downsizing, service diversification, and affiliation with healthcare systems are but a few notable examples. In this paper, we review the rationale and consequences of organizational change in U.S....

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...