This paper reviews recent quantitative urban models. These models are sufficiently rich to capture observed features of the data, such as many asymmetric locations and a rich geography of the transport network. Yet these models remain sufficiently tractable as to permit an analytical...

We analyze changes in pedestrian behavior over a 30-year period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Building on William Whyte's observational work from 1980, where he manually recorded pedestrian behaviors, we employ computer vision and deep learning...

We develop novel estimates of peak and off-peak price elasticities for urban mass transit demand in San Francisco using a large natural experiment with 3.6 million trip sessions and a natural field experiment that both have exogenous price subsidies. We then estimate the welfare impacts for...

We assemble a new global database on motor vehicle travel speed in over 1,200 large cities in 152 countries. We then estimate comparable city-level indices of travel speed and congestion. Most of the variation in urban travel speed is across countries, not within. National income per capita...

We examine whether ridesharing provides a meaningful transportation alternative for those who require ongoing healthcare. Specifically, we combine variation in UberX entry across the U.S. with the Treatment Episode Data Set to estimate the effect of ridesharing on admissions to substance use...

Online marketplaces have adopted new quality control mechanisms that can accommodate a flexible pool of providers. In the context of ride-hailing, we measure the effectiveness of these mechanisms, which include ratings, incentives, and behavioral nudges. Using telemetry data as an objective...

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...

The social costs of pollution and climate change hinge critically on humans' ability to adapt. Based on transaction records from the world's largest payment network, this research compiles daily travel flows and documents that China's rapid expansion of high-speed railways (HSR) facilitates the...

The sharing economy for a wide range of goods and services is expanding across the world. To direct the benefits from sharing capital services towards small-scale producers, governments in the developing world are increasingly intervening in fast-growing mechanization rental markets. However,...

We examine the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity in the context of taxi drivers. The AI we study assists drivers with finding customers by suggesting routes along which the demand is predicted to be high. We find that AI improves drivers' productivity by shortening the...