The neoclassical growth model is extended to allow for mobile labor. Following a negative shock to a small economy's capital stock, capital and labor frictions effect an equilibrium transition path during which wages remain below their steady-state level. Outmigration directly contributes to...

More than 17 percent of households in American central cities live in poverty; in American suburbs, just 7.4 percent of households live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to be the result of wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap...

Gibrat's law, the orthogonality of growth to initial levels, is considered a stylized fact of local population growth. But throughout U.S. history, local population growth has significantly deviated from orthogonality. In earlier periods smaller counties strongly converged whereas larger...

In an electoral framework of unidimensional two-candidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting, special interest groups present candidates with schedules that give the level of campaign contribution they will make for each feasible candidate policy location. Candidates, motivated by the...

An average adjustment cost which is convex with respect to the rate of gross investment successfully calibrates a neoclassical growth model to match real world observables including the transition paths of convergence speed, the shadow value of capital, interest rates, and savings rates....

Empirical attempts to measure the speed of convergence - the rate at which a country's per capita income approaches its steady state relative to its distance from its steady state - have started from the assumption that it is constant. In contrast, neoclassical models of capital accumulation...

A convex increasing marginal installation cost on one of two complementary capital inputs allows the neoclassical growth model to match observed transition paths for output, savings, the real interest rate, and the marginal value of installed physical capital. It can do so for both narrow and...

Using a newly constructed data panel on U.S. locality attributes, this paper sketches four sets of empirical facts on economic growth across U.S. counties. A first set of facts focuses on the time series and cross-correlation properties of local economic growth as measured by net migration, per...

The U.S. population has been migrating to places with high perceived quality of life. A calibrated general-equilibrium model shows that such migration follows from broad-based technological progress. Rising national wages increase demand for consumption amenities. Under a baseline...

Crowdedness varies widely among U.S. cities. A simple, static general equilibrium model suggests that plausible differences in metro areas' consumption amenities can account for much of the observed variation. Under a baseline calibration, differences in amenities valued at 30 percent of average...