"The Urban Shape of the Land of Opportunity: Does the Built Environment Causally Affect Intergenerational Mobility in the United States?"

Emanuel Agu

This paper identifies the causal effect of ten dimensions of neighborhood urban form (encompassing density, fragmentation, population centering, connectivity, land-use mix, and the temporal pace of urbanization) on children's long-run economic mobility. Using terrain ruggedness as an instrument for built-up density — the dimension with the strongest first stage — across 933 metropolitan and micropolitan areas (CBSAs) spanning the 48 conterminous states, with the 1947 Interstate Highway Plan as an independent second instrument, it finds that the strong negative density–mobility association is roughly 90% mediated by neighborhood demographic composition, a pattern that holds across all ten urban-form dimensions. The residual effect is consistent with Wilson's concentration-effects hypothesis: density penalties are amplified in high-poverty tracts, most strongly in metros where poverty is spatially concentrated. The results suggest urban form operates primarily as a proxy for neighborhood social composition.

"The City University of New York: A College System that Fosters Upward Mobility"

Emanuel Agu

This paper contributes to the research on “college mobility,” a metric that ranks colleges in terms of both the chances of upward intergenerational mobility among their alumni and the share of students from low-income families. Drawing on student-level records from 2004 to 2023, the study examines the mechanisms that contribute to high college mobility rates within the City University of New York (CUNY) system. The paper provides evidence to disentangle the portion of CUNY college mobility rates that reflects the enrollment of high-achieving students from low-income families from the portion that reflects a high degree of cross-class connection, or “economic connectedness,” to which low-income students are exposed at the college. The paper enriches the measurement of economic connectedness by incorporating socioeconomic indicators of the neighborhoods where students reside.

"Predicting Urban Densification: Comparing Modeling Choices in Five Countries"

Deborah Balk, Mark Montgomery, Stefan Leyk, Evgeny Noi, Emanuel Agu, and Alessandra Carioli

Urban densification is central to contemporary urban change, yet fine-scale forecasts of built-up growth remain highly sensitive to modeling assumptions. We compare seven modeling approaches for predicting continuous built-up surface change at 1 km resolution across five contrasting national contexts — Kenya, Vietnam, South Korea, Peru, and Spain — using the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) and a harmonized set of dynamic and geographic predictors. No single model performs best across all countries and metrics: more flexible methods (deep learning, gradient boosting, and random forests) generally outperform gravity and GLM-based approaches, and the most recent built-up layer carries the strongest predictive signal. Inter-model disagreement concentrates in densely built environments, indicating that structural uncertainty is greatest where urban form is most complex. We argue for a context-sensitive approach in which model selection depends on geography, evaluation priorities, and explicit attention to structural uncertainty.

"Spatial Dynamics of Mortality during the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York City: Evidence from Hart Island Mass Burials"

Emanuel Agu, Frank W. Heiland, Jennifer Brite, and Deborah Balk

During the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City saw the highest number of confirmed cases and deaths of any major city in the United States. This paper presents new evidence on the temporal and spatial impact the pandemic had on mortality using burial records from Hart Island. We find the mortality toll in the early stage of the pandemic was even larger in disadvantaged communities than previously estimated.

"The Impact of the Pension System on Income Distribution and Poverty: Empirical Evidence from Argentina, 2003-2013"

Emanuel Agu

This paper studies the incidence of pension policies on income distribution and poverty in Argentina, distinguishing the living arrangements of older people as a determinant of the global impact. Results suggest that changes in pension income contributed largely to reducing inequality and poverty among households composed of older people.

"Sub-National Age and Sex Distributions: New Data and Methods"

Mark Montgomery, Emanuel Agu, Alessandra Carioli, Stefan Leyk, and Deborah Balk

This paper introduces a public-domain collection of fine-resolution, sub-national age and sex distributions at global scale with more than 1,000 datasets assembled from the major programs of international demographic research (the UN Population Division, the U.S. Census Bureau, REDATAM, IPUMS-International, and the DHS and MICS). Rather than forcing heterogeneous and shifting administrative units into “harmonized” boundaries, it blends these demographic data with remotely sensed, high-resolution built-up land from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), gridding population onto a common spatial footing to yield sub-national longitudinal records spanning 1975 to the present. The paper also benchmarks the quality of sub-national age–sex reporting (undercounts of young children, age exaggeration among the elderly, and digit preference) against the World Population Prospects 2024.