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Research related to:  Urban

A Long History of a Short Block: Four Centuries of Development Surprises on a Single Stretch of a New York City Street

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Economic development is usually analyzed at the national level, but the literature on creative destruction and misallocation suggests the importance of understanding what is happening at much smaller units. This paper does a development case study at an extreme micro level (one city block in New York City), but over a long period of time (four centuries). 

William Easterly, Laura Freschi, and Steven Pennings

Housing Affordability: Top-Down Design and Spontaneous Order

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Urban planners are often suspicious of spontaneous order, associating it with chaos and anarchy. Though top-down design is indispensable for the construction of city infrastructure, it too often imposes excessive regulatory standards, which make housing unaffordable to the poor. In rapidly urbanizing countries, poor migrants from the countryside are especially hard hit. Subsidized housing provided to low-income households by governments rarely helps, as often this housing is too limited in scope.
Alain Bertaud

Read the working paper here. 
Listen to the podcast episode here.

Housing Affordability: Top-Down Design and Spontaneous Order

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At what scale level should top-down planning progressively vanish to allow a spontaneous order to emerge? And what local norms are necessary for this spontaneous order to result in viable neighborhoods that are easily connected to a metropolitan-wide infrastructure? Examples from Southeast Asia show that an equilibrium between top-down designed infrastructure and neighborhoods created through spontaneous order mechanisms can be achieved. Spontaneous order ignored or persecuted by government results only in slums.
Alain Bertaud

Read the policy brief here.
Listen to the podcast episode here.
See the infographic here.

Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point

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The Schelling model of a “tipping point” in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of “tipping” explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the US from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more “white flight” out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods.
William Easterly, NYU

Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: the Case of the Racial Tipping Point

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The Schelling model of a “tipping point” in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of “tipping” explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the US from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more “white flight” out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods.
William Easterly