A great deal of urban policy depends on the possibility of creating stable, economically and racially mixed neighborhoods. Many social interaction models - including the seminal Schelling (1971) model -- have the feature that the only stable equilibria are fully segregated. These models suggest...

Doha, the capital of the State of Qatar, has faced enormous economic growth and rapid urban transformation over the last few decades. More recently, this has been accentuated by the construction of major urban public transit systems in the State and a desire to implement the Transit-Oriented...

We study how an aggregate bank flow shock impacts German cities' GDP growth depending on the state of their local real estate markets. Identification exploits a policy framework assigning refugees to cities on a quasi-random basis and variation in non-developable area for the construction of a...

This paper shows that the products and prices offered in markets are correlated with local income-specific tastes. To quantify the welfare impact of this variation, I calculate local price indexes micro-founded by a model of non-homothetic demand over thousands of grocery products. These indexes...

For a variety of reasons described in the paper, improving the performance of urban school districts is more difficult today than it was several decades ago. Yet economic and social changes make performance improvement especially important today. Two quite different bodies of research provide...

The concept of a ubiquitous city, or uCity, is gaining attention worldwide. In a uCity, anyone is enabled by information and communication technologies (ICT) to do anything, anywhere, at any time. The uCity concept has spread more quickly than its implementation, which relies on a complex set of...

Will improvements in information technology eliminate face-to- face interactions and make cities obsolete? In this paper, we present a model where individuals make contacts and choose whether to use electronic or face-to-face meetings in their interactions. Cities are modeled as a means of...

Recent research has shown that industries that locate together in space also move together over the business cycle, and that this correspondence between spatial and temporal comovement is important to aggregate volatility. This paper asks whether this correspondence is due to local common shocks...

In recent decades, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as a significant driver of economic growth and enhancer of competitiveness. They constitute an estimated 90% of the total population of businesses, and contribute significantly, up...

This paper addresses the multifaceted relationships between culture and urban performance. It seeks to identify and examine evidence-based characteristics of urban success (or socio-economic performance) that are related to the cultural profile ("urban cultural value") of a city. Also, the...