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Journal Article
COVID and Cities, Thus Far
Key reasons for the existence of cities are the externalities created when people cluster together in close proximity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, such interactions came with health risks and people found other ways to interact. This article documents how cities changed during COVID-19 and considers how the persistence of new ways of interacting, particularly remote work, will shape the development of cities in the future. It first summarizes evidence showing how residential and commercial prices and activity adjusted at different distances from dense city centers during and since the ...
Working Paper
Measuring Movement and Social Contact with Smartphone Data: A Real-Time Application to COVID-19
Tracking human activity in real time and at fine spatial scale is particularly valuable during episodes such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact. We show that these data cover broad sections of the US population and exhibit movement patterns similar to conventional survey data. We develop and make publicly available a location exposure index that summarizes county-to-county movements and a device exposure index that quantifies social contact within venues. We use these indices to document how ...