TY  - JOUR
AU  - Glaeser,Edward L.
AU  - Gyourko,Joseph
TI  - Urban Decline and Durable Housing
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8598
PY  - 2001
Y2  - November 2001
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8598
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8598.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Edward L. Glaeser
Department of Economics
315A Littauer Center
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-0575
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: eglaeser@harvard.edu

Joseph Gyourko
University of Pennsylvania
Wharton School of Business
3620 Locust Walk
1480 Steinberg-Dietrich Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6302
Tel: 215/898-3003
Fax: 215/573-2220
E-Mail: gyourko@wharton.upenn.edu
AB  - People continue to live in many big American cities, because in those cities housing costs less than new construction. While cities may lose their productive edge, their houses remain and population falls only when housing depreciates. This paper presents a simple durable housing model of urban decline with several implications which document: (1) urban growth rates are leptokurtotic -- cities grow more quickly than they decline, (2) city growth rates are highly persistent, especially amount declining cities, (3) positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices, (4) negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population, (5) the relationship between changes in housing prices and changes in population is strongly concave, and (7) declining cities attract individuals with low levels of human capital.
ER  -