Jessie Handbury - Research

Jessie Handbury Associate Professor Real Estate Department The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania CV \| Research \| Teaching \| Home
Research Research Statement Published and Accepted Papers "Goods Prices and Availability in Cities" with David E. Weinstein. Review of Economic Studies, 2015, 82(1): 258-296. Media coverage: Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic CityLab Also available as NBER Working Paper 17067. Subsumes a previous working paper entitled "Is New Economic Geography Right? Evidence from Price Data''. "Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality," with Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dube, Ilya Rahkovsky and Molly Schnell, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019. Subsumes a previous working paper "Is the Focus on Food Deserts Fruitless? Retail Access and Food Purchases Across the Socioeconomic Spectrum" with Ilya Rahkovsky and Molly Schnell, 2017 (previously circulated as "What Drives Nutritional Disparities? Retail Access and Food Purchases Across the Socioeconomic Spectrum,’’ April 2015). Media coverage: New York Times Upshot, Chicago Booth Capital Ideas Blog, FiveThirtyEight Also available as NBER Working Paper 21126. Related article in Penn IUR Urban Link. "Urban Revival in America" with Victor Couture, Journal of Urban Economics, 2020. Media coverage: The Atlantic CityLab, Wall Street Journal "Measuring Movement and Social Contact with Smartphone Data: A Real-Time Application to COVID-19" with Victor Couture, Jonathan Dingel, Allison Green, and Kevin Williams, Journal of Urban Economics: Insights, 2021. Indices available for download here: COVID Exposure Indices "Are Poor Cities Cheap for Everyone? Non-Homotheticity and the Cost of Living Across U.S. Cities," Econometrica, 2021. Media coverage: New York Times Magazine, Chicago Booth Capital Ideas Blog "Income Growth and the Distributional Effects of Urban Spatial Sorting" with Victor Couture, Cecile Gaubert, and Erik Hurst, 2021. Conditionally accepted at the Review of Economic Studies. Media coverage: Chicago Booth Capital Ideas Blog Working Papers "Spatial Sorting within Cities" with Victor Couture, 2022. "Covid and Cities, thus far" with Gilles Duranton, 2022. "School Food Policy Affects Everyone: Retail Responses to the National School Lunch Program" with Sarah Moshary, 2021. "How Much Do Official Price Indexes Tell Us About Inflation?" with David E. Weinstein and Tsutomu Watanabe, 2017. Under revision. Media coverage: WSJ Real Time Economics Blog, Washington Post Wonkblog Also available as NBER Working Paper 19504. Selected Work in Progress "Quantifying Social Interactions Using Smartphone Data" with Victor Couture, Jonathan Dingel, and Allison Green. "The Disparate Effects of the Retail Apocalypse" with Yue Cao, Judy Chevalier, Kevin Williams, and Hayden Parsley. "Welfare Implications of Increased Retailer Participation in SNAP" with Anne Byrne, Xiao Dong, Erik James, and Katherine Meckel.