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Working Paper
The Closing of a Major Airport: Immediate and Longer-Term Housing Market Effects
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver’s Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing and little evidence of upward trending prices between announcement and closing. However, after airport closure, more higher income and fewer black households moved into these locations, and developers built higher quality houses. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes ...
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 ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The Closing of a Major Airport: Immediate and Longer-Term Housing Market Effects
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. Using a unique dataset, we examine the effects of closing Denver’s Stapleton Airport on nearby housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory price effects upon announcement, but no price changes at closing likely because closing was widely anticipated. Further, after airport closure, high income and white households moved into these locations and developers upgraded the quality of houses being built. Finally, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock changes had substantial effects on ...
Journal Article
Shipping Prices and Import Price Inflation
During the pandemic, there have been unprecedented increases in the cost of shipping goods accompanied by delays and backlogs at the ports. At the same time, import price inflation has reached levels unseen since the early 1980s. This has led many to speculate that the two trends are linked. In this article, we use new data on the price of shipping goods between countries to analyze the extent to which increases in the price of shipping can account for the rise in U.S. import price inflation. We find that the pass-through of shipping costs is small. Nevertheless, because the rise in shipping ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Jobs and the Gender Wage Gap
Prior studies have shown that women are more willing to trade off wages for short commutes than men. Given the gender difference in commuting preferences, we show that the wage return to commuting (i.e., the wage penalty for reducing commute time) that stems from the spatial distribution of jobs contributes to the gender wage gap. We propose a simple job choice model, which predicts that differential commuting preferences would lead to a larger gender wage gap for workers who face greater wage returns to commuting based on their locations of residence and occupations. We then show empirical ...
Working Paper
Formative Experiences and the Price of Gasoline
An individual?s initial experiences with a common good, such as gasoline, can shape their behavior for decades. We first show that the 1979 oil crisis had a persistent neg-ative effect on the likelihood that individuals that came of driving age during this time drove to work in the year 2000 (i.e., in their mid 30s). The effect is stronger for those with lower incomes and those in cities. Combining data on many cohorts, we then show that large increases in gasoline prices between the ages of 15 and 18 sig-nificantly reduce both (i) the likelihood of driving a private automobile to work and ...
Working Paper
Negative Externalities and Real Asset Prices: Closing of Stapleton Airport and Effect on Nearby Housing Markets
The closing of a busy airport has large effects on noise and economic activity. We examine the effects of Stapleton airport?s closing on nearby, Denver housing markets. We find evidence of immediate anticipatory effects on prices upon announcement of the closing, but no price changes at closing likely because it was widely anticipated. However, we find that high income and white households delayed moving into these locations until after the airport?s closing. Also, developers upgraded the quality of houses being built after closing. Further, post-closing, these demographic and housing stock ...
Working Paper
Evaluating Transportation Improvements Within Cities Using Quantitative Spatial Models
I describe the use of quantitative spatial models (QSMs) to evaluate the effects of transportation infrastructure within cities. After discussing the motivation for QSMs relative to other economic measurement techniques, I develop a simple QSM and detail the components that enter into the model. Next, I consider identification challenges and practical implementation. Finally, I highlight several shortcomings common in applications of QSMs, as well as growth areas where QSMs show promise for future development.
Working Paper
Freeway Revolts!
Freeway revolts were widespread protests across the U.S. following early urban Interstate construction in the mid-1950s. We present theory and evidence from panel data on neighborhoods and travel behavior to show that diminished quality of life from freeway disamenities inspired the revolts, a?ected the allocation of freeways within cities, and changed city structure. First, actual freeway construction diverged from initial plans in the wake of the growing freeway revolts and subsequent policy responses, especially in central neighborhoods. Second, freeways caused slower growth in population, ...