Does America face an affordable housing crisis and, if so, why? This paper argues that in much of America the price of housing is quite close to the marginal, physical costs of new construction. The price of housing is significantly higher than construction costs only in a limited number of...

Party platforms differ sharply from one another, especially on issues with religious content, such as abortion or gay marriage. Religious extremism in the U. S. appears to be strategically targeted to win elections, since party platforms diverge significantly, while policy outcomes like abortion...

People continue to live in many big American cities, because in those cities housing costs less than new construction. While cities may lose their productive edge, their houses remain and population falls only when housing depreciates. This paper presents a simple durable housing model of urban...

Many factors including incentive-pay, powerful shareholders, and takeover threats push for-profits managers towards maximizing shareholder value. One of the most striking factors about non-profit firms is that they have no comparable governance institutions, and the only check on managers are...

New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation’s premier metropolis. What accounts for New York’s rise and continuing success? The rise of New York in the early nineteenth century is the result of technological...

The theoretical framework of urban and regional economics is built on transportation costs for manufactured goods. But over the twentieth century, the costs of moving these goods have declined by over 90% in real terms, and there is little reason to doubt that this decline will continue....

In Manhattan and elsewhere, housing prices have soared over the 1990s. Rising incomes, lower interest rates, and other factors can explain the demand side of this increase, but some sluggishness on the supply of apartment buildings also is needed to account for the high and rising prices. In a...

Advocates of rent control often argue that rent control aids the mixing of rich and poor, and perhaps of the races as well. Economic theory does not necessarily predict that rent control will reduce segregation. The best case for rent control as an aid to integration is that it creates pockets...

Cities make it easier for humans to interact, and one of the main advantages of dense, urban areas is that they facilitate social interactions. This paper provides evidence suggesting that the resurgence of big cities in the 1990s is due, in part, to the increased demand for these interactions...