Jessie Handbury

• Jessie Handbury, School Food Policy Affects Everyone: Retail Responses to the National School Lunch Program.
• Victor Couture, Jonathan Dingel, Allison Green, Jessie Handbury, Kevin Williams (Forthcoming), Measuring Movement and Social Contact with Smartphone Data: A Real-Time Application to COVID-19.
• Jessie Handbury (2020), Urban Revival in America, Journal of Urban Economics.
• Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, Molly Schnell, Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dube (2019), Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134 (4), pp. 1793-1844. Related
  Links

  Subsumes previous working paper entitled, "Is the focus on food deserts fruitless? Retail access and food purchases across the socioeconomic spectrum," with Ilya Rahkovsky and Molly Schnell.
• Jessie Handbury, Victor Couture, Cecile Gaubert, Erik Hurst, Income Growth and the Distributional Effects of Urban Spatial Sorting.
• Jessie Handbury and David E. Weinstein (2014), Goods Prices and Availability in Cities, The Review of Economic Studies.
• Jessie Handbury, David E. Weinstein, Tsutomu Watanabe (Working), How Much Do Official Price Indexes Tell Us About Inflation?. Abstract

  Official price indexes, such as the CPI, are imperfect indicators of inflation calculated using ad hoc price formulae different from the theoretically well-founded inflation indexes favored by economists. This paper provides the first estimate of how accurately the CPI informs us about “true” inflation. We use the largest price and quantity dataset ever employed in economics to build a Törnqvist inflation index for Japan between 1989 and 2010. Our comparison of this true inflation index with the CPI indicates that the CPI bias is not constant but depends on the level of inflation. We show the informativeness of the CPI rises with inflation. When measured inflation is low (less than 2.4% per year) the CPI is a poor predictor of true inflation even over 12-month periods. Outside this range, the CPI is a much better measure of inflation. We find that the U.S. PCE Deflator methodology is superior to the Japanese CPI methodology but still exhibits substantial measurement error and biases rendering it a problematic predictor of inflation in low inflation regimes as well.

• Jessie Handbury (Under Revision), Are Poor Cities Cheap for Everyone? Non-Homotheticity and the Cost of Living Across U.S. Cities. Abstract

  Standard cost-of-living indexes assume that preferences are homothetic, ignoring the well-established fact that tastes vary with income. This paper considers how assuming homotheticity biases our estimates of spatial price indexes for consumers at different income levels. I use Nielsen household-level purchase data in over 500 categories of food products to calculate micro-founded income- and city-specific price indexes that account for non-homotheticity, as well as city-specific price indexes that do not. I find that the income-specific cross-city price indexes vary widely across income groups. Grocery costs are 20 percent lower in a poor city relative to a wealthy city for a low-income household, but they are 20 percent higher in the poor city for a high-income household. The homothetic price indexes perform well in predicting the cross-city variation in prices for low- and middle-income households, but poorly for high-income households. These results suggest that using homothetic cost-of-living indexes understate the relative price level in poor locations for rich households.. 

Past Courses

• BEPP9000 - Research Seminar

  Of the many ways that doctoral students typically learn how to do research, two that are important are watching others give seminar presentations (as in Applied Economics Seminars) and presenting one's own research. The BEPP 9000 course provides a venue for the latter. Wharton doctoral students enrolled in this course present applied economics research. Presentations both of papers assigned for other classes and of research leading toward a dissertation are appropriate in BEPP 9000. This course aims to help students further develop a hands-on understanding of the research process. All doctoral students with applied microeconomic interests are encouraged to attend and present. Second and third year Applied Economic Ph.D. students are required to enroll in BEPP 9000 and receive one-semester credit per year of participation.

• FNCE2090 - Real Estate Investments

  This course provides an introduction to real estate investing with a focus on financial and economic analysis. It is intended both as a foundational class for students considering a career in real estate as well as a survey class for students interested in finance who want to learn about the real estate sector. Project evaluation, financing strategies, risk assessment, investment decision making, and real estate capital markets are covered. No prior knowledge of the industry is required, but students will rapidly acquire a working knowledge of real estate markets and will quickly develop the quantitative tools to help them make investment decisions. Classes are conducted in a standard lecture format with discussion required. The course contains cases that help students evaluate the impact of more complex financing and capital markets tools used in real estate. There are three case studies and two midterms. FNCE 1000 is required as the class assumes comfort with Corporate Finance concepts and terms.

• FNCE7210 - Real Estate Investments

  This course provides an introduction to real estate investing with a focus on financial and economic analysis. It is intended both as a foundational class for students considering a career in real estate as well as a survey class for students interested in finance who want to learn about the real estate sector. Project evaluation, financing strategies, risk assessment, investment decision making, and real estate capital markets are covered. No prior knowledge of the industry is required, but students will rapidly acquire a working knowledge of real estate markets and will quickly develop the quantitative tools to help them make investment decisions. Classes are conducted in a standard lecture format with discussion required. The course contains cases that help students evaluate the impact of more complex financing and capital markets tools used in real estate. There are three case studies and two midterms. FNCE 6110 is required as the class assumes comfort with Corporate Finance concepts and terms.

• REAL2090 - Real Estate Investments

  This course provides an introduction to real estate investing with a focus on financial and economic analysis. It is intended both as a foundational class for students considering a career in real estate as well as a survey class for students interested in finance who want to learn about the real estate sector. Project evaluation, financing strategies, risk assessment, investment decision making, and real estate capital markets are covered. No prior knowledge of the industry is required, but students will rapidly acquire a working knowledge of real estate markets and will quickly develop the quantitative tools to help them make investment decisions. Classes are conducted in a standard lecture format with discussion required. The course contains cases that help students evaluate the impact of more complex financing and capital markets tools used in real estate. There are three case studies and two midterms. FNCE 1000 is required as the class assumes comfort with Corporate Finance concepts and terms.

• REAL7210 - Real Estate Investments

  This course provides an introduction to real estate investing with a focus on financial and economic analysis. It is intended both as a foundational class for students considering a career in real estate as well as a survey class for students interested in finance who want to learn about the real estate sector. Project evaluation, financing strategies, risk assessment, investment decision making, and real estate capital markets are covered. No prior knowledge of the industry is required, but students will rapidly acquire a working knowledge of real estate markets and will quickly develop the quantitative tools to help them make investment decisions. Classes are conducted in a standard lecture format with discussion required. The course contains cases that help students evaluate the impact of more complex financing and capital markets tools used in real estate. There are three case studies and two midterms. FNCE 6110 is required as the class assumes comfort with Corporate Finance concepts and terms.

• REAL8990 - Independent Study

  All independent studies must be arranged and approved by a Real Estate Department faculty member.

• REAL9000 - Research Seminar

  Of the many ways that doctoral students typically learn how to do research, two that are important are watching others give seminar presentations (as in Applied Economics Seminars) and presenting one's own research. The BEPP 9000 course provides a venue for the latter. Wharton doctoral students enrolled in this course present applied economics research. Presentations both of papers assigned for other classes and of research leading toward a dissertation are appropriate in BEPP 9000. This course aims to help students further develop a hands-on understanding of the research process. All doctoral students with applied microeconomic interests are encouraged to attend and present. Second and third year Applied Economic Ph.D. students are required to enroll in BEPP 9000 and receive one-semester credit per year of participation.

• REAL9950 - Dissertation

  Dissertation

• Why Some Suburbs Are Trying to Be More Like Cities, The Wall Street Journal - 04/24/2016
• The Real Source of America's Urban Revival, The Atlantic CityLab - 02/23/2016
• Why Groceries Cost Less in Big Cities, The Atlantic Citylab - 06/04/2015
• Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn’t Mean They’ll Buy It, New York Times: The Upshot - 05/08/2015
• Food Deserts, Community Colleges And Innovative Slackers, FiveThirtyEight - 05/06/2015
• Daily data: Food deserts are only part of the problem, Chicago Booth Capital Ideas Blog - 04/08/2015
• Feeding Urban Communities: A Look at Disparities in Food Access and Nutritional Consumption, Penn IUR Urban Link - 03/19/2015
• Remember the paranoia about inflation? It’s dead, almost everywhere., Washington Post Wonkblog - 10/17/2014
• CPI: Noise Pollution at Low Altitudes, WSJ Real Time Economics Blog - 10/31/2013
• Who Says New York Is Not Affordable?, New York Times Magazine - 04/23/2013
• Food Cheaper in City – No Baloney., The Wall Street Journal - 05/26/2011

Knowledge @ Wharton

• NBA Playoffs With Seth Partnow, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/07/2025
• The Trade War Playbook: Tariffs, Uncertainty, and U.S. Economic Policy, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/07/2025
• How AI Can Unlock Hybrid Creativity in the Workplace, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/06/2025
• Are DoorDash and Other Delivery Apps Hurting Restaurants?, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/06/2025
• Workplace Boundaries and Social Media | Nancy Rothbard, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/06/2025
• Five Ways Gen AI Is Changing Workplace Identity, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/05/2025
• How Consumers Perceive Layoffs: Offshoring vs. Automation, Knowledge @ Wharton - 05/02/2025
• Understanding Trump’s Tariff Tactics Through the Lens of Negotiation, Knowledge @ Wharton - 04/30/2025
• NFL Draft Strategy With Kevin Cole, Knowledge @ Wharton - 04/30/2025
• Why Fed Independence Is Critical, Knowledge @ Wharton - 04/29/2025