Nathaniel Baum-Snow is an urban economist with a wide range of urban policy research interests, including in housing and real estate, transportation, the operation of urban labor markets, and local economic development.

Baum Snow’s current active research includes studies about the consequences for affordability of expanding housing supply, characterization of wage and productivity differences across locations within cities, and impacts of neighborhood environments on children’s long-run outcomes.  

Baum-Snow’s published research makes significant contributions to understanding how transportation infrastructure generates changes in urban form, and associated welfare consequences, in both the US and Chinese contexts. His recent high-impact publications include work on local productivity spillovers, the microgeography of housing supply, and a comprehensive review of the literature about housing supply and affordability in the Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. His research portfolio also includes influential studies on school desegregation and residential location patterns, the effects of low-income housing tax credit developments on neighborhoods, the causes and consequences of urban gentrification, and the impact of urban rail transit expansions across sixteen cities in the US. Another stream of published research examines the reasons for which workers earn more and have more dispersed wages in larger cities. Baum-Snow received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 2005 and served as a faculty member in the Economics Department at Brown University from 2005 to 2015 before joining the University of Toronto. From 2018 to 2025, he was a managing editor at the Journal of Urban Economics. He is now a coeditor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.