220 million Americans crowd together in the 3% of the country that is urban. 35 million people live in the vast metropolis of Tokyo, the most productive urban area in the world. The central city of Mumbai alone has 12 million people, and Shanghai almost as many. We choose to live cheek by jowl,...

Empirical research on cities starts with a spatial equilibrium condition: workers and firms are assumed to be indifferent across space. This condition implies that research on cities is different from research on countries, and that work on places within countries needs to consider population,...

Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise...

Carbon dioxide emissions may create significant social harm because of global warming, yet American urban development tends to be in low density areas with very hot summers. In this paper, we attempt to quantify the carbon dioxide emissions associated with new construction in different locations...

Research on entrepreneurship often examines the local dimensions of new business formation. The local environment influences the choices of entrepreneurs; entrepreneurial success influences the local economy. Yet modern urban economics has paid relatively little attention to entrepreneurs. This...

There is a strong connection between per-worker productivity and metropolitan area population, which is commonly interpreted as evidence for the existence of agglomeration economies. This correlation is particularly strong in cities with higher levels of skill and virtually nonexistent in less...

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S....

<DIV>Despite recent corporate scandals, the United States is among the world’s least corrupt nations. But in the nineteenth century, the degree of fraud and corruption in America approached that of today’s most corrupt developing nations, as municipal governments and robber barons alike found new...</div>

<DIV>Not-for-profit organizations play a critical role in the American economy. In health care, education, culture, and religion, we trust not-for-profit firms to serve the interests of their donors, customers, employees, and society at large. We know that such firms don't try to maximize profits,...</div>