Historically coal has offered both benefits and costs to urban areas. Benefits include coal's role in fueling industry and thus employment. The primary costs are air pollution and its impact on human health. This paper starts by using a Rosen-Roback style model to examine how differences in...

We argue that the interaction between mobility and wealth provides a view that rationalizes low geographic migration rates, despite migration costs being lower than currently thought. We reach this conclusion by developing and solving a quantitative dynamic spatial equilibrium model with...

Suárez Serrato and Zidar (2016) identify state corporate tax incidence in a spatial equilibrium model with imperfectly mobile firms. Their identification argument rests on comparative-statics omitting a channel implied by their model: the link between common determinants of a location's...

This paper studies how refugee inflows affect receiving communities using highly disaggregated German administrative data at a 1km × 1km resolution. We develop a novel spatial equilibrium model that features two geographic levels, small neighborhoods and more aggregated local labor markets...

This paper studies how demographics affect aggregate labor market power, the urban wage premium and the spatial concentration of population. I develop a quantitative spatial model in which labor market competitiveness depends on the demographic composition of the local workforce. Using highly...

Place-based investments can have unintended general equilibrium effects and face challenges of time inconsistency. This paper simulates the granular impact of alternative spatial and temporal designs of such investments, using Quantitative Spatial Models where the strategy of the policymaker is...

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...

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...