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Journal Article
Hybrid Officing Will Shift Where People and Businesses Decide to Locate
Many businesses are likely to shift to hybrid officing following the pandemic, with employees working remotely several days per week. The reduced frequency of commutes and associated decrease in traffic may fuel residential construction in outlying suburbs, especially in the largest metropolitan areas. At the same time, suburban employers may move their offices closer to city centers due to reduced space needs, eased parking constraints, and less frequent commutes.
Journal Article
Millennials, baby boomers, and rebounding multifamily home construction
Jordan Rappaport analyzes the forces driving the recent rebound in multifamily construction.
Working Paper
Productivity, congested commuting, and metro size
The monocentric city model is generalized to a fully structural form with leisure in utility, congested commuting, and the equalizing of utility and perimeter land price across metros. Exogenous and agglomerative differences in total factor productivity (TFP) drive differences in metro population, radius, land use, commute time, and home prices. Quantitative results approximate observed correspondences among these outcomes across U.S. metros. Traffic congestion proves the critical force constraining population. Self-driving cars significantly increase the sensitivity of metro population to ...
Journal Article
What are the benefits of hosting a major league sports franchise?
Over the last few decades the number of U.S. metropolitan areas large enough to host a franchise from one of the four major professional sports leagues has soared. Even as major league baseball, football, basketball and hockey have expanded to include more franchises, demand by metro areas continues to exceed supply. Metro areas have thus been forced to compete with each other to retain and attract franchises. ; The resulting large public spending on new sports facilities has been quite controversial. Usually these costly projects are justified by claims that hosting a sports franchise spurs ...
Journal Article
Home Prices Are Overvalued but Will Decline Only Gradually
The surge in home prices since the start of the pandemic and the sharp increase in interest rates during 2022 have made purchasing a home much less affordable. Homeownership costs relative to rents suggest home prices are considerably overvalued. However, relief is unlikely in the near future: owners have an incentive to remain in their current homes until rates decrease, mitigating downward pressure on prices.
Working Paper
Urban Growth Shadows
Does a location's growth benefit or suffer from being geographically close to large economic centers? Spatial proximity may lead to competition and hurt growth, but it may also generate positive spillovers and enhance growth. Using data on U.S. counties and metro areas for the period 1840?2017, we document this tradeoff between urban shadows and urban spillovers. Proximity to large urban centers was negatively associated with growth from 1840 to 1920, and positively associated with growth after 1920. Using a two-city spatial equilibrium model with intra-city and inter-city commuting, we show ...
Journal Article
Downtown Office Use Has Declined, but Some Metropolitan Areas Are Faring Better than Others
Hybrid working has cut demand for office space, especially in the downtowns of medium and large metropolitan areas. However, the degree of this decline has varied considerably across metropolitan downtowns, with demand remaining solid in many.
Working Paper
Monocentric city redux
This paper argues that centralized employment remains an empirically relevant stylization of midsize U.S. metros. It extends the monocentric model to explicitly include leisure as a source of utility but constrains workers to supply fixed labor hours. Doing so sharpens the marginal disutility from longer commutes. The numerical implementation calibrates traffic congestion to tightly match observed commute times in Portland, Oregon. The implied geographic distribution of CBD workers' residence tightly matches that of Portland. The implied population density, land price, and house price ...
Journal Article
The long-term outlook for U.S. residential construction
The recovery of U.S. housing construction paused during the first half of 2013. Stronger growth is likely to resume in the near term. But over the long term, home construction is likely to contract as aging baby boomers downsize.
Working Paper
A quantitative system of monocentric metros
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 and above that in the representative metro. For a given level of productivity, transportation technology proves to be the most important quantitative determinant of population, land area, population density, and house prices across and within metros. Changes in highway capacity primarily affect ...