About

Greg Howard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research primarily focuses on internal migration, housing markets, regional inequality, social mobility, and rational inattention. He develops and tests economic models that explain migration patterns, housing price dynamics, and the effects of regional universities on local economies and social outcomes. His work often combines theoretical modeling with empirical analysis, using detailed data to uncover new facts and causal relationships in economic geography and labor economics. Howard's research includes studying the dynamics of internal migration, the impact of credit access on mobility and neighborhood choice, and the fractal nature of city size distributions. He also investigates the role of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and regional public universities in promoting social mobility and economic resilience. Additionally, Howard explores the concept of rational inattention in decision-making contexts, such as online chess and strategic interactions. His scholarship has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, and Journal of Financial Economics. He has forthcoming and recent work that addresses important policy-relevant questions about housing affordability, regional economic divergence, and the effects of remote work on housing markets. Howard will be on sabbatical at Duke University in Fall 2026 and UNC-Chapel Hill in Spring 2027.

Research topics

• Labour economics
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Macroeconomics
• Econometrics
• Monetary economics

Selected publications

• Supplementary Data for "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-04-17

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <span>This data is part of the necessary data to replicate "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications" by Howard and Shao, in The Review of Economic Studies. </span>

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Package for "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications"

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-05-07

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This package contains the data and code necessary to reproduce "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications," except for data from the GCCP and PSID that is not allowed to be published here. Howard, Greg and Hansen Shao (2026). "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications," Review of Economic Studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Package for "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications"

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-05-07

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This package contains the data and code necessary to reproduce "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications," except for data from the GCCP and PSID that is not allowed to be published here. Howard, Greg and Hansen Shao (2026). "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications," Review of Economic Studies.

  PublisherDOI

• Supplementary Data for "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications"

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-04-17

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <span>This data is part of the necessary data to replicate "The Dynamics of Internal Migration: A New Fact and its Implications" by Howard and Shao, in The Review of Economic Studies. </span>

  PublisherDOI

• JUE insight: Moving cost magnitudes in moving cost models

  Journal of Urban Economics · 2025-12-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The internal migration literature has estimated a wide range of moving costs, including some that are several times larger than annual income. How should economists interpret this estimate? I show that in standard models, average moving costs can be decomposed into an “information” term and a “returns to migration” term. The information term is proportional to the Shannon entropy of next period’s location minus the Shannon information of staying in the same location. In simple models, the information term is much larger than the returns to migration term; in some cases, the returns to migration term is zero. Therefore, average moving costs are a helpful statistic about the model’s predictive power regarding future moves but are not invariant to seemingly innocuous choices of the modeler.

  PublisherDOI

• The short- and long-run effects of remote work on U.S. housing markets

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2023-08-30 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  Remote work has increased the demand for housing and changed the demand for the location of that housing. Because housing supply is heterogeneous across space and more elastic in the long-run, the effects on rents and populations may differ over time. We use the lens of a spatial housing model with heterogeneous housing supply elasticities to identify the housing and location demand changes from 2020–2022, and show that the same shocks will have different effects in the long run. Even though rents and prices increased significantly in the short-run, we estimate that in the long-run, increased housing demand will increase rents by only 1.8 percentage points, and that changing location demand will decrease rents by 0.3 percentage points, with a more negative impact on cities in which CPI is measured and cities that were initially expensive.

  PublisherDOI

• A Check for Rational Inattention

  Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics · 2023-09-07 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Who is rationally inattentive, and in what situations? Models of rational inattention allow agents to make mistakes in their actions but assume the agents optimize their allocation of attention. Using millions of online chess moves, I test this assumption by comparing the marginal benefits (better moves) and marginal costs (less time for future moves) of attention. I find that high-skilled players equalize marginal benefit and cost, but low-skilled players have higher marginal cost (i.e., they spend too long on moves). I also find that having less time leads to deviations from rational inattention. A simple intervention improves players’ attention allocation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: "A Check for Rational Inattention"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-08-04

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This is the replication package for "A Check for Rational Inattention," accepted in 2023 by the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.

  PublisherDOI

• Validation of an Optimized qPCR Workflow for MIC Risk Identification and Oilfield Microbial Monitoring

  2023-11-13

  article

  In this work, a scalable workflow for field sample preservation, DNA extraction, and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was developed and validated for accurate and rapid oilfield microbial monitoring and microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) risk identification. Validation experiments were performed on a variety of challenging oilfield sample types including produced water and pigging sludge to assess the complete optimized qPCR workflow and eight MIC-related qPCR targets including sulfate reducing prokaryotes (SRP) and corrosive methanogens (micH). The predicted in silico taxonomic coverage of these eight MIC-related qPCR targets were compared to a complete microbial community analysis of the samples using 16S rRNA gene sequencing and were found to capture &amp;gt;95% of the taxa present, indicating method reliability for identifying MIC-related microorganisms. The simplified qPCR workflow validated in this work brings qPCR closer to the field to replace or supplement current microbial monitoring practices for higher information yield, ultimately allowing for optimized mitigation strategies and identification of MIC-risk.

  PublisherDOI

• "Workhorses of Opportunity": Regional Universities Increase Local Social Mobility

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jack Liebersohn

  6 shared

• Robert F. Martin

  McGill University

  5 shared

• Beth Anne Wilson

  Federal Reserve Board of Governors

  5 shared

• Russell Weinstein

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  4 shared

• Arianna Ornaghi

  University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

  4 shared

• Carl Liebersohn

  3 shared

• Yuhao Yang

  2 shared

• Sue Goodman

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  1 shared

Education

• B.S.

  University of North Carolina

  2010