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Working Paper
The Rising Value of Time and the Origin of Urban Gentrification
In recent decades, gentrification has transformed American central city neighborhoods. I estimate a spatial equilibrium model to show that the rising value of high-skilled workers? time contributes to the gentrification of American central cities. I show that the increasing value of time raises the cost of commuting and exogenously increases the demand for central locations by high-skilled workers. While change in the value of time has a modest direct effect on gentrification of central cities, the effect is substantially magnified by endogenous amenity improvement driven by the changes in ...
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 ...
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 ...