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...

Population density varies widely among U.S. metro areas. A simple, static general equilibrium model demonstrates that moderate differences in metro areas' consumption amenities can cause extremely large differences in their population density. Such amenities are more strongly capitalized into...

Population density varies widely across US cities. A simple, static general equilibrium model suggests that moderate-sized differences in cities' total factor productivity can account for such variation. Nevertheless, the productivity required to sustain above-average population densities...

U.S. economic activity is overwhelmingly concentrated at its ocean and Great Lakes coasts. Economic theory suggests four possible explanations: a present-day productivity effect, a present-day quality-of-life effect, delayed adjustment following a historical productivity or quality-of-life...

This paper studies the long run development of U.S. counties and metro areas from 1800 to 2000. In earlier periods smaller counties converge whereas larger counties diverge. Over time, due to changes in the age composition of locations and net congestion, convergence dissipates and divergence...

The monocentric city framework is generalized to comprise a system of metros. A "representative" closed metro calibrates parameters and establishes a reservation utility and perimeter land price that must be matched by open metros. The open metros are assumed to have exogenous productivity below...

The expansion of Federal Housing Administration lending has let households with imperfect credit or the inability to make a large down payment maintain access to mortgage borrowing. Rather than excluding such households, lenders have been applying strict underwriting conditions on all borrowers....

A prominent strand of economic literature argues that population growth rates across locations areas are uncorrelated with the population levels of those locations (“Gibrat’s Law”). Such uncorrelated growth, it is argued, can account for the current distribution of population across...

Unemployment rates differ widely and persistently across U.S. metro areas. Metros that have experienced high or low unemployment rates in one year have tended to stay that way 10 years and even 20 years later. ; Such variation and persistence raises questions: Why don’t households move from...