Adam Smith was one of the first to call attention to economic growth differences among nations. He described how the workings of markets, specifically the extent of specialization in production, offer a plausible explanation of these differentials. This idea has been enriched over the years with...

While there has been considerable research empirically quantifying and simulating the roleof borrowing constraints on homeownership rates, the primary focus of this work has been onmeasuring the relative importance of income and wealth constraints with respect to ownershipoutcomes. An important...

This paper seeks to answer the question of why Entertainment Retail Centers (ERCs) develop as they do and what we can expect from these centers of consumption in the near future. Beginning with a "network" view of cities, where cities are nodes in an integrated economic system, the paper...

Housing policy under the Clinton and Bush Administrations has sought to boost homeownership while also narrowing racial gaps in owner-occupancy rates. Against that backdrop, homeownership rose sharply in the 1990s, but white-minority gaps remain in excess of 25 percentage points. We analyze...

This paper extends unobserved heterogeneity to the multinomial logit model (MNL) framework in the context of mortgages terminated by refinance, move, or default. It tests for the importance of unobserved heterogeneity when borrower characteristics such as income, age and credit score are...

The transformation of the Polish economy during the early 1990s offers an unusual opportunityto examine the evolution of a new market for urban land. There has been a great deal oftheoretical and empirical research focused on urban land value functions that has derived fromthe work of Muth...

Commercial land price gradients for an emerging real estate market are estimated using spatial regression techniques. Spatial statistics are used to explore the extent of spatial autocorrelation in the residuals of an OLS land price gradient model. Spatial autocorrelation is present but not to...

Moderate walking between home and transit stops can be a significant portion of daily physical activity. Yet, we know little about the role of public transit in promoting physical activity at the neighborhood level. Using a pre-post treatment-control research design, we examine whether new Expo...

This paper develops a new measure of "quality of the business environment" that complements existing measures of "quality of life". An annual panel of these measures is constructed and analyzed for 37 cities from 1977 to 1995. Findings indicate that many cities attractive to firms are...

In recent years, much of U.S. federal housing policy has focused on two complimentary goals: to increase U.S. homeownership rates while also narrowing enormous and longstanding racial gaps in homeownership. Against this backdrop, the U.S. homeownership rate rose to historic highs in the 1990s,...