In recent years, the United States, like many other industrialized nations, has experienced wide swings in the growth rate of housing prices. To understand the behavior of housing prices and their influence on the economy, it is crucial to have an accurate measure of aggregate housing prices. In...

More than 19 percent of people in American central cities are poor. In suburbs, just 7.5 percent of people live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to come from wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap (the traditional explanation of...

US economic activity is overwhelmingly concentrated at its ocean and Great Lakes coasts, reflecting a large contribution from coastal proximity to productivity and quality of life. Extensively controlling for correlated natural attributes and initial conditions decisively rejects that the...

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 marginal adjustment cost allows the neoclassical growth model to match observed transition paths for output growth, savings, investment, the real interest rate, and the shadow value of installed capital. Such an adjustment cost need apply only to one of two complementary capital inputs...

U.S. economic activity is overwhelmingly concentrated at its ocean and Great Lakes coasts. Economic theory suggests four possible explanations: a present-day productivity effect, a present-day quality-of-life effect, delayed adjustment following a historical productivity or quality-of-life...

An average adjustment cost which is convex with respect to the rate of gross investment success-fully 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....

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...

Population density varies widely across U.S. cities. A calibrated general equilibrium model in which productivity and quality-of-life differ across locations can account for such variation. Individuals derive utility from consumption of a traded good, a nontraded good, leisure, and...

Population density varies widely across U.S. cities. A simple, static general equilibrium model suggests that moderate-sized differences in cities’ total factor productivity can account for such variation. Nevertheless, the productivity required to sustain above-average population densities...