Employment growth is strongly predicted by smaller average establishment size, both across cities and across industries within cities, but there is little consensus on why this relationship exists. Traditional economic explanations emphasize factors that reduce entry costs or raise...

We investigate the speed at which clusters of invention for a technology migrate spatially following breakthrough inventions. We identify breakthrough inventions as the top 1% of US inventions for a technology during 1975-1984 in terms of subsequent citations. Patenting growth is significantly...

More than 19 percent of people in American central cities are poor. In suburbs, just 7.5 percent of people live in poverty. The income elasticity of demand for land is too low for urban poverty to come from wealthy individuals' wanting to live where land is cheap (the traditional explanation of...

Recent studies provide conflicting evidence on the connection between ethnic or racial neighborhood segregation and outcomes. Some studies find that residence in an enclave is beneficial, some reach the opposite conclusion, and still others imply that any relationship is small. One hypothesis is...

Over the past 30 years, eastern Massachusetts has seen a remarkable combination of rising home prices and declining supply of new homes, which doesn't appear to reflect any lack of land. In this paper, we examine the increasing number of land-use regulations in Greater Boston. These regulations...