This tribute to Jane Jacobs connects some of her ideas on cities and her work on ethical systems. In particular, I present data suggesting that ethical norms do substantially differ between big cities and small towns. These findings motivate a model showing cities tend to limit the ability of...

A large body of recent research argues that social, or non-market, interactions can explain a wide range of puzzling phenomena from fashion cycles to stock market crashes. This paper attempts to connect the range of these papers with a general model and a broad empirical overview. We establish...

America is a nation filled with guns and gunowners. Using the General Social Survey, we investigate who owns guns. Gunowners resemble neither criminals nor victims, although they do hunt. Waiting periods appear to have little effect on the overall level of gun ownership, but they do lower the...

Cities are physical structures, but the modern literature on urban economic development rarely acknowledges that fact. The elasticity of housing supply helps determine the extent to which increases in productivity will create bigger cities or just higher paid workers and more expensive homes. In...

James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. As a consequence, Boston stagnated, but Curley kept winning...

This paper organizes a discussion of the costs and benefits of cities around the question: Are cities becoming obsolete? While minimizing transport costs for manufactured goods no longer justifies the existence of cities, they still facilitate the division of labor and the flow of ideas. Cities'...