We examine the 10k reports for 122 of the largest US “retail” firms, and analyze the impacts on their operating costs and factor usage of what venues they use to sell their goods: traditional stores that they operate, internet sales, and wholesaling to other stores. We find that the firm...

We utilize the data set developed by Acemoglu & Restrepro (2017) depicting the likely adoption rate of robots by firms in each US MSA. Our focus is on the impact of this automation metric on the market for industrial real estate (factories and warehouses). We get similar results to their...

Using the 5% public use micro sample of the 1990 U.S. census, we find that observationally equivalent workers in the manufacturing sector earn higher wages when they are in urban labor markets that have a larger share of national or metropolitan employment in their same occupation and industry...

This paper develops an Asymmetric Nash Equilibrium model of welfare provision by states when the benefit payment is a local public good and a fixed population of welfare recipients distributes itself between states with logistic "migration" function. The model shows that state size is an...

Using the 5% public use micro sample of the 1990 U.S. census, we find that observationally equivalent workers in the manufacturing sector earn higher wages when they are in urban labor markets that have a larger share of national or metropolitan employment in their same occupation and industry...

This paper investigates how a system of local law enforecement agencies operates within a metropolitan area. In a cross section of 236 US MSA, the paper finds that greater agency fragmentation leads to less law enforcement effort, but also to less crime. This seemingly contradictory result is...

For centuries, cities have been modeled as geographically centered markets in which locational scarcity generates Ricardian Land Rent that in turn increases over time as cities grow. This paper first presents some empirical evidence that this is not the case: inflation-adjusted locational rent...

This paper investigates how local law enforcement agencies operate within a metropolitan area when there is an elastic flow of criminal activity between them. A model is developed in which a unilateral increase in local law enforcement effort has the effect of "scaring" away criminals as well as...

This paper develops an Asymmetric Nash Equilibrium model of welfare provision by states when the benefit payment is a local public good and welfare recipients distribute themselves between states with a finite elasticity (through a logistic function). The model thus provides estimates of how the...