If the 2020 surge in working from home became permanent, how would the distribution of jobs and residents within and across U.S. cities change? To study this question, we build a quantitative spatial equilibrium model of job and residence choice with commuting frictions between 4,502...

We provide new evidence on the drivers of the early US coronavirus pandemic. We combine an epidemiological model of disease transmission with quasi-random variation arising from the timing of stay-at-home-orders to estimate the causal roles of policy interventions and voluntary social...

Why do cities differ so much in productivity? We document that most of the measured dispersion in productivity across US cities is spurious and reflects granularity bias: idiosyncratic heterogeneity in plant-level productivity and size, combined with finite plant counts. As a result, economies...

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from other geographic differences in life...

Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. To further our understanding of the underlying reasons I study internal migration in Germany, using the Mikrozensus, a very large sample of households living...

Despite a broad consensus on the need to take into account the value of public services and geographical cost of living differences when measuring poverty, there is little reliable evidence on how these factors actually affect poverty estimates. Unlike the standard approach in studies of the...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Our results show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of several interrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, and infrastructure capital; the infusion...

This paper studies the long-term distribution of energy-efficiency outcomes in the German residential sector. To uncover the underlying energy efficiency of buildings, we estimate the causal response of building-level heat energy demand to variability in heating degree days. We examine...

We analyze a stylized creative region’s economy. There are two goods (consumption and creative capital) and creative class members differ in their income generating abilities. The distribution of abilities in the creative class population is such that the median ability is less than the...