Dynamic Urban Economics

We develop a dynamic urban model combining features of quantitative spatial and macro-housing models. It includes multiple locations, forward-looking households, commuting, costly migration, uninsurable income risk, housing tenure choice, and housing frictions. The model operates in continuous time, with shocks and choices occurring at discrete intervals. This ``mixed time'' approach enables efficient computation of steady-state equilibria and transition dynamics, even with thousands of location pairs. Using a model of the San Francisco Bay Area, we show how forward-looking behavior, spatial frictions, and transition dynamics reshape estimated effects of spatially heterogeneous shocks and policies, traditionally studied with static models.