Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation

We quantify the amount of spatial misallocation of labor across US cities and its aggregate costs. Misallocation arises because high productivity cities like New York and the San Francisco Bay Area have adopted stringent restrictions to new housing supply, effectively limiting the number of workers who have access to such high productivity. Using a spatial equilibrium model and data from 220 metropolitan areas we find that these constraints lowered aggregate US growth by 36 percent from 1964 to 2009. (JEL E23, J24, J31, R23, R31)

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics

• Publication date

  2019-04-01

• Fields of study

  Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1257/MAC.20170388
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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