Nathaniel Baum-Snow

Urban Economics

Nathaniel Baum-Snow’s research investigates reasons for levels of and changes in the spatial organisation of population and economic activity in urban areas. He has evaluated the roles that various types of transportation infrastructure have played in generating changes in urban form in the United States and China. This work shows a central role for highway construction for driving urban decentralisation in both countries. Mr Baum-Snow has also investigated the reasons why workers earn more and have more dispersed wages in larger cities and how these explanations help us to understand the productivity advantages of density and city size. This work highlights the importance of differences in returns to work experience for driving wage gaps between large and medium sized cities in particular. It also provides evidence that the productivity advantages of city size have been rising most rapidly for the most educated workers in the largest cities, and that this phenomenon explains an important share of the growth in US wage inequality since 1980. More recent research examines the causes and consequences of recent neighbourhood change in US urban areas. His research is published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies and the Review of Economics and Statistics, among other outlets.

Mr Baum-Snow has recently received a five year Insight Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council in Canada to study productivity spillovers and spatial clustering at very local spatial scales using data on the universe of Canadian firms and workers since 2001. While visiting CESifo, he will be working on writing up econometric theory and initial results for the first paper funded by this grant. This paper synthesizes tools and methods from the peer effects and agglomeration literatures to measure productivity and factor utilisation spillovers between firms at the Canadian postal code level. The paper will measure the extent to which these spillovers are mediated through input-output relationships, labour pooling relationships and technological relationships as compared to the linear in means specification most commonly used in the peer effects literature.

Nathaniel Baum-Snow is an Associate Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2005, after which he was in the Economics Department at Brown University for 10 years. Mr Baum-Snow has recently been named co-Managing Editor of the Journal of Urban Economics.