Search Results
Journal Article
Big cities and the highly educated: what's the connection
Why are more college-educated workers gravitating to large metropolitan areas? As Jeffrey Brinkman explains, amenities are increasingly important in people?s location decisions, a trend that may help inform urban policymaking.
Journal Article
Location dynamics: a key consideration for urban policy
What determines where businesses and households locate? Location decisions can affect the economic health of cities and metropolitan areas. But as Jeffrey Brinkman explains, how firms, residents, and workers go about choosing where to locate can involve complex interactions with sometimes unpredictable consequences.
Journal Article
Making Sense of Urban Patterns
Why do cities everywhere exhibit the same general patterns of density and development? And how can we explain some striking variations? The streets of Philadelphia roll west through a collage of urban environments familiar to city dwellers nearly everywhere. From Penn Square, the central site of the iconic stone City Hall, Market Street traverses a canyon of concrete and glass office buildings that gradually give way to commercial and apartment structures and mixed uses. A mile from City Hall, the busy thoroughfare crosses the Schuylkill River, and density again picks up as the University of ...
Journal Article
Travel Behavior and the Coronavirus Outbreak
Jeffrey Brinkman and Kyle Mangum examine cellphone data from coast to coast to find out how Americans changed their travel behavior in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Journal Article
The Costs and Benefits of Fixing Downtown Freeways
Urban freeways spurred our suburban boom. Can burying them do the same for the urban core?
Journal Article
Population, Prices, and Amenities
To make housing more affordable, we need to understand what makes some places hot, others not.
Working Paper
The Costs of Access: Freeway Disamenities Across U.S. Cities
We construct city-level measures of freeway disamenities and examine their association with metropolitan growth. We combine neighborhood-level estimates from Brinkman and Lin (2024) with calibrated spatial models for U.S. metropolitan areas. Each city measure is based on a counterfactual that removes estimated disamenities while holding modeled travel times fixed. Cities with larger estimated disamenities grew more slowly, conditioned on total freeway mileage and initial population. Total freeway mileage is positively associated with growth in the same specification. Estimated disamenities ...
Working Paper
Congestion, agglomeration, and the structure of cities
Superseded by Working Paper 16-13. Congestion pricing has long been held up by economists as a panacea for the problems associated with ever increasing traffic congestion in urban areas. In addition, the concept has gained traction as a viable solution among planners, policymakers, and the general public. While congestion costs in urban areas are significant and clearly represent a negative externality, economists also recognize the advantages of density in the form of positive agglomeration externalities. The long-run equilibrium outcomes in economies with multiple correlated, but ...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Underfunded Municipal Pension
This paper analyzes the determinants of underfunding of local government?s pension funds using a politico-economic overlapping generations model. We show that a binding down payment constraint in the housing market dampens capitalization of future taxes into current land prices. Thus, a local government?s pension funding policy matters for land prices and the utility of young households. Underfunding arises in equilibrium if the pension funding policy is set by the old generation. Young households instead favor a policy of full funding. Empirical results based on cross-city comparisons in the ...
Working Paper
Congestion, Agglomeration, and the Structure of Cities
Supersede WP 13-25. Congestion costs in urban areas are significant and clearly represent a negative externality. Nonetheless, economists also recognize the production advantages of urban density in the form of positive agglomeration externalities. The long-run equilibrium outcomes in economies with multiple correlated but o setting externalities have yet to be fully explored in the literature. Therefore, I develop a spatial equilibrium model of urban structure that includes both congestion costs and agglomeration externalities. I then estimate the structural parameters of the model using a ...