Person:

Glaeser, Edward

The COVID‐19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government‐imposed restrictions that temporarily shuttered millions of American businesses. We use a nationwide survey of thousands of small business owners to establish three main facts about business owners’ decisions to reopen at the end of the lockdowns. First, roughly 60 percent of firms planned to reopen within days of the end of legal restrictions, suggesting that the lockdowns were generally binding for businesses—although nearly 30 percent expected to delay their reopening by at least a month. Second, decisions to delay reopenings did not seem to be driven by concerns about employee or customer health; even businesses in high‐proximity sectors with the highest health risks generally reported intentions to reopen as soon as regulations allowed. Third, pessimistic demand projections primarily explain delays among firms that could legally reopen. Owners expected demand to be one‐third lower than before the crisis throughout the pandemic. Using experimentally induced shocks to perceived demand, we find that a 10 percent decline in expected demand results in a 1.5 percentage point (8 percent) increase in the likelihood that firms expected to remain closed for at least one month after being legally able to open. We use follow‐up surveys to cross‐validate expectations with realized outcomes. Overall, our results suggest that governments set more stringent guidelines for reopening than what many businesses would have selected, suggesting that governments may have internalized costs of contagion that businesses did not.

Americans travel 7 to 9 miles on average for shopping and recreational activities, which is far longer than the 15-minute (walking) city advocated by ecologically-oriented urban planners. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of local trip behavior in US cities using GPS data on individual trips from 40 million mobile devices. We define local usage as the share of trips made within 15-minutes walking distance from home, and find that the median US city resident makes only 12% of their daily trips within such a short distance. We find that differences in access to local services can explain eighty percent of the variation in 15-minute usage across metropolitan areas and 74 percent of the variation in usage within metropolitan areas. Differences in historic zoning permissiveness within New York suggest a causal link between access and usage, and that less restrictive zoning rules, such as permitting more mixed-use development, would lead to shorter travel times. Finally, we document a strong correlation between local usage and experienced segregation for poorer, but not richer, urbanites, which suggests that 15-minute cities may also exacerbate the social isolation of marginalized communities.

Cities provide access to stores, public amenities, and other people, but that access may provide less benefit for lower-income and younger urbanites who lack money and means of easy mobility. Using detailed GPS location data, we measure the urban mobility and experienced racial and economic isolation of the young and the disadvantaged. We find that students in major metropolitan areas experience more racial and income isolation, spend more time at home, stay closer to home when they do leave, and visit fewer restaurants and retail establishments than adults. Looking across levels of income, students from higher-income families visit more amenities, spend more time outside of the home, and explore more unique locations than low-income students. Combining a number of measures into an index of urban mobility, we find that, conditional on income, urban mobility is positively correlated with home neighborhood characteristics such as distance from the urban core, car ownership, and social capital.