Urban Economics Lab
The Urban Economics Lab at MIT focuses on studying economic activity and economic trends in cities. The Lab uses analytical models and big data to understand what makes cities thrive or decline, how housing values are formed and oscillate, and how local politics and social phenomena manifest in the context of increasing global urbanization.
Latest News
New Working Paper - Long Run Housing Supply
New MIT CRE working paper by Professor Albert Saiz provides an introduction to the economics of housing supply. This comprehensive study explores the critical factors shaping the housing supply in metropolitan areas, its consequences for affordability and urban growth, and discusses the methods used to measure long-run housing supply elasticity across cities.
This paper offers valuable insights for researchers, urban planners, and policymakers interested in addressing housing challenges in growing metropolitan areas.
New Publication - Natural Barriers and Urban Connectivity
This new publication by Prof. Albert Saiz and coauthors at Nature Cities studies how the presence of natural barriers influence transportation environments and urban densities across the globe.
The paper introduces three novel indexes: the share of natural barriers, non-convexity (a measure of natural fragmentation), and the average road detour, to measure and study the practical reach and effects of natural barriers around global cities. It calculates these indexes for areas in and around four separate global city-boundary definitions, augmenting the original data with relevant additional variables.
New Working Paper - Immigration and Native Flight
Is ethnic segregation driven by native flight or immigrant self-isolation? If the former, which natives avoid immigrants? Which immigrants? What is the geographic scope of homophilic residential preferences?
Our new working paper, "Immigrants and Native Flight: Geographic Extent and Heterogeneous Preferences," by Albert Saiz and Vinicios Sant'Anna, with Bence Boje-Kovacs, Ismir Mulalic, and Marie Schultz-Nielsen, answers these questions.
Using comprehensive administrative data for the entire population of Denmark and leveraging the quasi-random nature of refugee placements, we propose a novel Arrival-Stayer Markov Instrumental Variable (ASM-IV) to generate experimental variation regarding local immigrant arrivals.
We find strong evidence of native flight, even at the building level. Flight is stronger among the older population and a reaction to the arrival of low-income immigrants. As neighborhoods become more immigrant-dense, housing prices decline, and subsequent move-ins are more likely to be other immigrants or young, low-income native citizens without children. Natives moving out of immigrant-dense neighborhoods tend to move to new homes in areas that are distinctively more "native."
