Cities are among the best examples of complex systems. The adaptive components of a city, such as its people, firms, institutions, and physical structures, form intricate and often non-intuitive interdependencies with one another. These interdependencies can be quantified and represented as...

We study entrepreneurship and growth through the lens of U.S. cities. Initial entrepreneurship correlates strongly with urban employment growth, but endogeneity bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near cities led to specialization in industries, like steel, with...

A lack of affordable housing is a growing crisis for many communities in the US, particularly in urban neighborhoods with constrained housing markets. We discuss the housing imbalance and affordability crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area. Land use regulations are the biggest impediment in...

Interest in analyzing the dynamics of the Great Recession among regional economists has largely focused on ‘regional resilience.’ This concept, while still not fully formed, considers the relationship between regional characteristics and the regional response to economic shocks, particularly...

This paper examines the impact of culture on industrial similarity during the trade liberalization process between 1998 and 2007. The identification strategy relies on the regional variation in exposure to trade and compares the industrial structures of pairs of adjacent counties that do or do...

We develop a frictional labor market model with multiple regions and heterogeneous firms to study how frictions impeding labor mobility across space affect the joint allocation of labor across firms and regions. Bringing the model to matched employer-employee data from Germany, we find that...

COVID-19 has been a tragedy for California. More than 4 million Californians have contracted the disease, and over 64,000 have died from it. And beyond the cost of illness and death, the pandemic and the state’s actions to contain it have devastated California’s economy. Low-income and...

Ukraine is a big country with a developed multimodal transport infrastructure that includes a network of roads, railways, airports and seaports, as well as pipelines. In addition, the country has significant infrastructure for electricity generation and distribution, and for gas transportation....

The city of Shenzhen has been labeled as China's Silicon Valley. On August 18, 2019, Chinese authorities released a policy document stating that China will make Shenzhen a model city for others to follow. After an extensive literature review on relevant topics, including economic development,...

This paper integrates daytime and nighttime satellite imagery into a spatial general-equilibrium model to evaluate the returns to investments in new motorways. Our approach has particular value in developing-country settings in which granular data on economic activity are scarce. To demonstrate...