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Working Paper
The Geography of Travel Behavior in the Early Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic
We use a panel of county-level location data derived from cellular devices in the U.S. to track travel behavior and its relationship with COVID-19 cases in the early stages of the outbreak. We find that travel activity dropped significantly as case counts rose locally. People traveled less overall, and they specifically avoided areas with relatively larger outbreaks, independent of government restrictions on mobility. The drop in activity limited exposure to out-of-county virus cases, which we show was important because such case exposure generated new cases inside a county. This suggests the ...
Working Paper
Has COVID Reversed Gentrification in Major U.S. Cities? An Empirical Examination of Residential Mobility in Gentrifying Neighborhoods During the COVID-19 Crisis
This paper examines whether neighborhoods that had been gentrifying lost their appeal during the pandemic because of COVID-induced health risks and increased work-from-home arrangements. By following the mobility pattern of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods in 39 major U.S. cities, we note a larger increase of 1.2 percentage points in the outmigration rate from gentrifying neighborhoods by the end of 2021, relative to nongentrifying ones, with out-of-city moves accounting for over 71 percent of the increased flight. The share of out-of-city moves into gentrifying neighborhoods also ...
Working Paper
Homeownership and the Distributional Effects of Local Shocks
I develop a dynamic quantitative spatial framework that combines key features of quantitative spatial and lifecycle housing models to study the distributional effects of spatially heterogeneous shocks. The model features many locations, moving costs, uninsurable income risk, lifecycle dynamics, housing tenure choice and housing frictions. The model is set in continuous time, which enables efficient computation. I apply the framework to analyze the welfare effects of heterogeneous productivity shocks across U.S. cities. I find that local productivity shocks have important distributional ...