In this chapter, we analyze immigration and its effect on urban and regional economies focusing on productivity and labor markets. While immigration policies are typically national, the effects of international migrants are often more easily identified on local economies. The reason is that...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of research on neighborhoods and social networks and their role in shaping behavior and economic outcomes. We include a discussion of empirical and theoretical analyses of the role of neighborhoods and social networks in crime, education, and labor-market...

We provide an integrated treatment of the theoretical literature on urban land use inspired by the monocentric model, including extensions that deal with multiple endogenous business centers, various dimensions of heterogeneity, and durable housing. After presenting the theory and distilling its...

This chapter surveys recent literature examining the relationship between environmental amenities and urban growth. In this survey, we focus on the role of both exogenous attributes such as climate and coastal access and endogenous attributes such as local air pollution and green space. A city's...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then discuss how these factors are frequently measured in the data and note some resulting empirical regularities....

We propose an integrated framework to discuss the empirical literature on the local determinants of agglomeration effects. We start by presenting the theoretical mechanisms that ground individual and aggregate empirical specifications. We gradually introduce static effects, dynamic effects, and...

This chapter surveys recent developments in agglomeration theory within a unifying framework. We highlight how locational fundamentals, agglomeration economies, the spatial sorting of heterogeneous agents, and selection effects affect the size, productivity, composition, and inequality of...

This chapter is concerned with methods for analyzing spatial data. After initial discussion of the nature of spatial data, including the concept of randomness, we focus most of our attention on linear regression models that involve interactions between agents across space. The introduction of...

Structural estimation is a methodological approach in empirical economics explicitly based on economic theory, in which economic modeling, estimation, and empirical analysis are required to be internally consistent. This chapter illustrates the structural approach with three applications in...

Recovery of causal relationships in data is an essential part of scholarly inquiry in the social sciences. This chapter discusses strategies that have been successfully used in urban and regional economics for recovering such causal relationships. Essential to any successful empirical inquiry is...