Research on entrepreneurship often examines the local dimensions of new business formation. The local environment influences the choices of entrepreneurs; entrepreneurial success influences the local economy. Yet modern urban economics has paid relatively little attention to entrepreneurs. This...

There is a strong connection between per-worker productivity and metropolitan area population, which is commonly interpreted as evidence for the existence of agglomeration economies. This correlation is particularly strong in cities with higher levels of skill and virtually nonexistent in less...

One approach to urban areas emphasizes the existence of certain immutable relationships, such as Zipf's or Gibrat's Law. An alternative view is that urban change reflects individual responses to changing tastes or technologies. This paper examines almost 200 years of regional change in the U.S....

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...

The remarkable boom and bust of America’s housing markets during the first decade of the twenty-first century now join the stock market gyrations of the 1920s and the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, doing as much damage to the received wisdom about housing markets and housing policy as...

These seven papers answer the question: How do not-for-profit firms behave in response to a governance system that is not constrained by profit?

Most international measures of corruption rank the United States today as one of the least corrupt nations. However, in the early 1850's this was not the case. How did this change? What happned? This important edited volume tackles this important question.

The great housing convulsion that buffeted America between 2000 and 2010 has historical precedents, from the frontier land boom of the 1790s to the skyscraper craze of the 1920s. But this time was different. There was far less real uncertainty about fundamental economic and geographic trends,...

Like many other assets, housing prices are quite volatile relative to observable changes in fundamentals. If we are going to understand boom-bust housing cycles, we must incorporate housing supply. In this paper, we present a simple model of housing bubbles that predicts that places with more...