Working Papers
Demographic Differences in Social Exposure to High-Income People, with Jonathan Dingel (Chicago), Allison Green (Princeton), and Jessie Handbury (Wharton)
Draft Coming Soon
What demographic groups is least likely to encounter high-income individuals in their daily lives? How do social preferences contribute to segregation of neighborhoods and shared spaces?
The Fast, the Slow, and the Congested: Urban Transportation in Rich and Poor Countries, with Prottoy Akbar (Aalto), Gilles Duranton (Wharton), and Adam Storeygard (Tufts)
Quarterly Journal of Economics, Revise and Resubmit
How do travel speed and congestion vary in cities across the world? Why is urban travel so much faster in richer countries?
Media Coverage: TIME, The Economist, Marginal Revolution | Popular Summary: VoxEU | In Bangladesh: Daily Star, Prothom Alo, Dhaka Tribune
Publications
Income Growth and the Distributional Effects of Urban Spatial Sorting, with Cecile Gaubert (UC Berkeley), Jessie Handbury (Wharton), and Erik Hurst (Chicago)
Review of Economic Studies, 2023
Does rising income inequality cause urban gentrification, and what are the consequences for poor households?
Media Coverage: USA Today, The New York Review of Books | Popular summary: Bloomberg CityLab, Chicago Booth Capital Ideas Blog
Neighborhood Change, Gentrification, and the Urbanization of College Graduates, with Jessie Handbury (Wharton)
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2023
How did the neighborhood choice of college-educated Americans evolve over the last 40 years, what caused this evolution, and what are its consequences?
Mobility and Congestion in Urban India, with Prottoy Akbar (Aalto), Gilles Duranton (Wharton), and Adam Storeygard (Tufts)
American Economic Review, 2023
What are the determinants of urban travel speed in a developing country?
Media Coverage: The Hindu, Mint, Times of India 1, 2, Hindustan Times, Knowledge@Wharton | Popular summary: VoxEU, Ideas for India, World Economic Forum
Connecting the Countryside via E-commerce: Evidence from China, with Ben Faber (UC Berkeley), Yizhen Gu (Peking University), and Lizhi Liu (Georgetown)
American Economic Review: Insights, 2021.
Can e-commerce trading bridge the urban-rural divide in developing countries?
Media Coverage: VoxDev, VoxChina, J-Pal | Featured in: World Development Report 2020, World Trade Report 2018, AEA Research Highlight, World Bank Blog, Luohan Academy
JUE Insight: Measuring Movement and Social Contact with Smartphone Data: a Real-Time Application to Covid-19, with Jonathan Dingel (Chicago), Allison Green (Princeton), Jessie Handbury (Wharton), and Kevin Williams (Yale)
Journal of Urban Economics, 2021
How suitable are smartphone data for quantifying movement and social contact?
Github repository of smartphone movement data for Covid19 research | Popular summary: Berkeley Haas News
Urban Revival in America, with Jessie Handbury (Wharton)
Journal of Urban Economics, 2020
Why have college-educated Americans become increasingly likely to live downtown since the 1990s?
Media Coverage: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Forbes, Seeking Alpha | Popular summary: Bloomberg CityLab
Speed, with Gilles Duranton (Wharton) and Matt Turner (Brown)
Review of Economics and Statistics, 2018
What are the determinant of driving speed, and the cost of traffic congestion in the United States?
Knowledge Spillovers in Cities: An Auction Approach
Journal of Economic Theory, 2015
How do urban environments favor the free flow of knowledge and ideas?
Older Papers
Valuing the Consumption Benefits of Urban Density
American Economic Journal: Econ Policy, Reject and Resubmit
How valuable is the variety of non-tradable services available to residents of urban areas?
Other Writings
Urban youth most isolated in large cities, Nature (in the "News and Views" section of January 2024, review of Cook, Currier, and Glaeser).
Why is traffic so slow in some cities? Originally written for Quora in December 2023, reproduced in Apple News, and Forbes.
Selected Work in Progress
Remote Work and Urban Transportation, with Prottoy Akbar (Aalto), Gilles Duranton (Wharton), and Adam Storeygard (Tufts)
How did the rise in remote work affect travel speed and congestion around the world?
The Pathways to Homelessness, with Pierre-Loup Beauregard (UBC), David Green (UBC), and Jeffrey Hicks (Toronto)
What life events raise one's odds of becoming homeless?
The Gains from Online Integration: Theory and Evidence from China, with Ben Faber (UC Berkeley), Cecile Gaubert (UC Berkeley), Yizhen Gu (Peking University), Ming Li (CUHK), and Wei Lin (CUHK)
How did the spread of broadband and mobile internet in China affect spatial inequality and economic growth over the past two decades?
Accessibility, City Size, and Economic Development, with Prottoy Akbar (Aalto), Gilles Duranton (Wharton), Bernardo Ribeiro (UBC), and Adam Storeygard (Tufts)
How does accessibility vary with a country's level of economic development? Could cities in poor countries be inefficiently large?
Speed and reliability of road travel in the world, with Prottoy Akbar (Aalto), Gilles Duranton (Wharton), Lin Fan (LSE), and Adam Storeygard (Tufts)
What are the determinants of the speed and reliability of intercity road travel?