This paper develops models of spatial equilibrium in which a central metropolis emerges to supply manufactured goods to an agricultural hinterland. The location of the metropolis is not fully determined by the location of resources: as long as it is not too far from the geographical center of...

How do people arrange themselves when they are free to choose work and residence locations, when commuting is costly, and when increasing returns may affect production? We consider this problem when the location set is discrete and households have heterogenous preferences over...

In a city where individuals endogenously choose their residential location, firms determine their spatial efficiency wage and a geographical red line beyond which they do not recruit workers. This is because workers experiencing longer commuting trips provide lower effort levels than those...

We study how urban land use fragmentation affects the subjective wellbeing of city residents. Therefore, we calculate fragmentation metrics based on the European Urban Atlas for 15,000 households in the German Socio-Economic Panel. Using random and fixed effects specifications, we find that...

This paper develops a model of the geographic distribution of crime in an urban area. Agents select their occupation, residence, consumption, and housing. The paper is the first to formally study how the location of crime, the residence of workers, and housing prices are affected by the spatial...

This paper studies the interaction between dynamic traffic congestion and urban spatial equilibrium, using a model that is a straight unification of the Vickrey (1969) bottleneck congestion model and the Alonso (1964) monocentric city model. In a monocentric city with a bottleneck at the...

This paper develops a model of the geographic distribution of crime in an urban area. When the police protect some neighborhoods (concentrated protection), the city becomes segregated. When the police are evenly deployed across the city (dispersed protection), an integrated city emerges. Unequal...

This paper develops a model of the geographic distribution of crime in an urban area. When the police protect some neighborhoods (concentrated protection), the city becomes segregated. When the police are evenly deployed across the city (dispersed protection), an integrated city emerges. Unequal...

This paper investigates second-best congestion pricing in a monocentric city characterized by distortionary, rigid regulatory mechanisms in the housing market (building height restrictions, zoning and property taxation). The Pigouvian toll is shown to retain its optimality under any setting with...

Productivity levels and productivity growth rates vary significantly over space. These differences are perhaps most pronounced between countries, but they remain acutely evident within national spaces as economic growth favors some cities and regions and not others. In this paper, we map the...

We develop a new dynamic general equilibrium model to explain firm entry, exit, and relocation decisions in an urban economy with multiple locations and agglomeration externalities. We characterize the stationary distribution of firms that arises in equilibrium. We estimate the parameters of the...

For a monocentric city with traffic congestion, Wheaton [W. C. Wheaton, Land Use and Density in Cities with Congestion, Journal of Urban Economics, 43 (1998) 258-272] describes that, to optimize the congestion externality, lot size zoning requires upward adjustment to the market population...

Knowledge based firms like IT companies do neither have a capital- nor a land intensive production. They predominantly rely on qualified labour and increasingly depend on the location of its (potential) employees. This would imply that firms follow its workers and not the other way around....

In this paper, I model a simple hierarchical inter-urban system in which the location of business firms is considered together with the determination of residential land-use patterns. By supposing a spatial externality between the business firms and all the residents of the region, three spatial...

This course, offered by the MIT Center for Real Estate, focuses on developing an understanding of the macroeconomic factors that shape and influence markets for real property. We will develop the theory of land markets and locational choice. The material covered includes studies of changing...

This paper develops a new way to present standard urban models graphically and a new rent function called the rent-commuting cost function. The rent-commuting cost function represents the relationship between rent and total commuting cost. At least theoretically, it is superior to the...

In a city where individuals endogenously choose their residential location, firms determine their spatial efficiency wage and a geographical red line beyond which they do not recruit workers. This is because workers experiencing longer commuting trips provide lower effort levels than those...