Urban Economics

Growing up in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods can have long-lasting effects. In 1966, Black families in Chicago sued the public housing authority over housing policies that segregated Black families. In response, the Chicago Housing Authority created a voucher program that would...

With more than 600,000 individuals in jails on any given day and more than 7 million passing through jail at some point during each year, the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. In a landmark 1976 decision, Estelle v. Gamble, the US Supreme Court ruled that...

Empirical research in economics often examines the behavior of agents located in a geographic space. In such cases, statistical inference is complicated by the interdependence of economic outcomes across locations. A common approach to account for this dependence is to cluster standard errors based...

The decline in housing affordability over recent decades has promoted an enhanced interest in housing supply. This chapter presents descriptive evidence about the evolution of us housing prices, quantities, and regulations since 1980, indicating that supply constraints appear to be increasingly...

We introduce the concept of racial capital, defined as the collective material and non- material assets of the racial groups to which a child is exposed while growing up, and examine its potential to explain racial disparities in life outcomes that persist even after accounting for a broad range of...

This paper examines the long-term impact of keeping versus losing ones home following a mortgage delinquency in the aftermath of the Great Recession, studying the trajectory of homeownership, consumption, and financial well-being over the subsequent decade. Our research design leverages the...

Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement,...

We propose a spatial equilibrium model with heterogeneous households holding general non-homothetic preferences over tradable goods and housing. In equilibrium, desirable and productive locations command high housing prices. So long as housing is a necessity, these locations are disproportionately...

We measure the level and growth of education segregation in American workplaces from 2000 to 2020. American workplaces show an educational segregation, measured by the degree to which the establishment has mostly workers of similar education levels, that is comparable to racial residential...

Data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) indicate an unprecedented 43 percent increase in the number of people residing in homeless shelters in the United States between 2022 and 2024, reversing the gradual decline over the preceding sixteen years. Three-quarters of this rise...

In the World Bank Enterprise Survey, the share of entrepreneurs who are women first rises and then falls with national income, which reverses the well-known U-shaped relationship between female labor force participation and economic development. This paper presents a model of entrepreneurship in...

This chapter examines the role of spatial sorting in shaping economic inequality in the United States. We first document the evolution of firm and worker sorting by skill level between 1980 and 2017. We highlight a shift since 2000, where both high-education workers and firms increasingly sort away...

We introduce a new methodology to detect and measure economic activity using geospatial data and apply it to steel production, a major industrial pollution source worldwide. Combining plant output data with geospatial data, such as ambient air pollutants, nighttime lights, and temperature, we train...

We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across US commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages, accounting for individual and regional characteristics. The share of good jobs in manufacturing...

We investigate the effects of sewer access on neighborhood characteristics in developing world cities. Because it is more difficult to move sewage uphill than downhill, otherwise similar neighborhoods on opposite sides of drainage basin divides may face different costs of sewer access. We exploit...

The standard view of housing markets holds that the flexibility of local housing supplyshaped by factors like geography and regulationstrongly affects the response of house prices, house quantities and population to rising housing demand. However, from 2000 to 2020, we find that higher income growth...

We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent of employees hired after March 2020 live at least fifty miles from their...

This chapter surveys new data sources employed in urban and regional economics in the past decade and the insights they have enabled. We first provide a primer on the data sources, including advantages, disadvantages and use cases. Historical data sources include linked census records as well as...

Healthcare employment has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force since 1980, overtaking retail trade to become the largest industry by employment in 2009. We document key facts about the rise of healthcare jobs. Earnings for healthcare workers have risen nearly twice as fast as those in...

Starting in January 2025, New York City became the first city in the United States to introduce a fee for vehicles entering its central business district (CBD). Using Google Maps Traffic Trends, we show that the policy increased speeds in the CBD, had spillovers onto non-CBD roads, and reduced...

We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties...

We build a granular GIS database that covers Chinas national highways, modern motorways, traditional railways, high-speed railways, and waterways at an annual frequency from 1993 to 2020. Overall network length more than tripled after 1993, with half the increase accounted for by modern motorways...

We revisit the rationale for place-based policies using a canonical urban framework with agglomeration spillovers. We derive six main lessons. First, the spatial allocation is inefficient even when spillover elasticities are constant across regions. Second, under constant and positive spillover...

The recent development of quantitative urban models provides a new set of tools for evaluating transport improvements. Conventional cost-benefit analyses are typically undertaken in partial equilibrium. In contrast, quantitative urban models characterize the spatial distribution of economic activity...

Property taxes represent the largest discretionary revenue source for local governments in the United States. Because these taxes are collected by applying a tax rate to an assessed value of a property, the effective tax rate on a property computed as a percentage of its value depends on the tax...

We develop a dynamic urban model combining features of quantitative spatial and macro-housing models. It includes multiple locations, forward-looking households, commuting, costly migration, uninsurable income risk, housing tenure choice, and housing frictions. The model operates in continuous time,...

Place-based policy in the United States comprises a wide range of government programs that are spread across federal, state, and local agencies and that rely on public, private, and nonprofit organizations for policy design and implementation. We document how loosely connected vertical policy supply...

Using China's expansion of the high-speed rail system (HSR) as a quasi-natural experiment, we analyze the comprehensive vehicle registration data from 2010 to 2023 to estimate the causal impact of HSR connectivity on the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Implementing several identification...

Residential properties with the lowest rent levels provide the highest investment returns to their owners. Using detailed rent, cost, and price data from the United States, Belgium, and The Netherlands, we show that this phenomenon holds across housing markets and time. If anything, low-rent units...

We introduce, analyze, and describe subnational data on cross-gender friendships for nearly 200 countries and territories, using data from 1.38 trillion ties between 1.8 billion Facebook users. Homophily by gender exists nearly everywhere, with individuals' strongest ties exhibiting less homophily...

We summarize recent methods to study optimal spatial policies. We center the discussion on policies that implement the optimal distribution of population in the presence of spatial spillovers, spatial transfers to optimally tackle redistribution between rich and poor regions, and optimal...

Research at the intersection of development and spatial economics is increasingly important to address pressing issues in rapidly-urbanizing cities in low- and middle- income countries. This handbook chapter presents the canonical spatial model and then explores it through the lens of development...

We examine the recent literature that studies the spatial distribution of economic activity across both space and time. We discuss the methodological advances enabling the incorporation of dynamic forces of economic activitysuch as endogenous innovation, forward-looking location choices, capital and...

We use high-resolution spatial data to build a novel global annual gridded GDP dataset at 1, 0.5, and 0.25 resolutions from 2012 onward. Our random forest model trained on local and national GDP achieves an R above 0.92 for GDP levels and above 0.62 for annual changes in regions left out of the...

This paper proposes that the adoption of the modern U.S. mortgage (i.e., low down payment, long-term, and fixed-rate)led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) loan insurance programsset the stage for the mid-twentieth century U.S. baby boom by dramatically...

This handbook chapter presents the major advances made in the field of economic geography over the past decade. It starts by documenting a number of motivating empirical facts. It then shows how a quantitative regional model that combines the insights from two seminal models from an earlier...

Place-based industrial interventionspolicies that promote production and investment in specific regionsare often proposed with the intent of improving economic conditions for residents, particularly "left-behind" workers in distressed local labor markets. This chapter discusses the theoretical...

This paper studies the effects of the largest residential racial desegregation initiative in U.S. history, the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, Gautreaux moved thousands of Black families into predominantly white neighborhoods to support racial and economic...

Increasing within-country disparities have led policymakers to deploy public employment reallocation as a place-based policy tool to support struggling regions. This paper surveys the economics literature on capital relocations, purpose-built capitals, and public agency decentralization programs,...

Local land use and state and federal environmental regulations proliferated in the early 1970s. About this time, US residential construction productivity began to decline; today, it is close to the level of the 1930s. In contrast, manufacturing productivity has risen for many decades. In the auto...

In a typical year, about 5 percent of tenants have an eviction case filed against them. In Nonpayment and Eviction in the Rental Housing Market (NBER Working Paper 33155), John Eric Humphries, Scott T. Nelson, Dam Linh Nguyen, Winnie van Dijk, and Daniel C. Waldinger analyze lease-level landlord...

How do environmental goods and policies shape spatial patterns of economic activity? How will climate change modify these impacts over the coming decades? How do agglomeration, commuting, and other spatial forces and policies affect environmental quality? We distill theoretical and empirical...

We study how preferences over the demographic composition of co-patrons affects income segregation in shared spaces. To distinguish demographic preferences from tastes for other venue attributes, we study venue choices within business chains. We find two notable regularities: preferences for high...

We study the economic effects of the interaction of nature loss and climate change in a model that incorporates important aspects of both processes. We capture the distinct ways in which they affect economic activitywith nature constituting a key factor of production and climate change destroying...

Immigrant enclaves offer valuable ethnic amenities but may delay assimilation. We study enclave formation in the Age of Mass Migration by using the centralized location decisions for ethnic Catholic churches. After a church opening, same-ethnicity residents of chosen neighborhoods experienced...

How can we use the novel capacities of large language models (LLMs) in empirical research? And how can we do so while accounting for their limitations, which are themselves only poorly understood? We develop an econometric framework to answer this question that distinguishes between two types of...

The U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, with over seven million admissions to jails each year. Incarcerated individuals are the only group in the U.S. that have a constitutional right to receiving "reasonably adequate" health care. Yet, there is little oversight and funding...

In this study, we investigate whether reproductive rights affect migration. We do so using a synthetic difference-in-differences design that leverages variation from the 2022 Dobbs decision, which allowed states to ban abortion, and population flows based on change-of-address data from the United...