This paper develops a dynamic model of neighborhood choice along with a computationally light multi-step estimator. The proposed empirical framework captures observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity across households and locations in a flexible way. The model is estimated using a newly...

Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income. Typically, urban areas are less than fully stratified, and the question arises...

In many theoretical public finance models, school quality plays a central role as a determinant of household location choices and in turn, of neighborhood stratification. In contrast, the recent empirical literature has almost universally concluded that the direct effect of school quality on...

Prompted by widespread concerns about public school quality, a growing empirical literature has measured the effects of greater choice on school performance. This paper contributes to that literature in three ways. First, it makes the observation that the overall effect of greater choice, which...

This paper develops a dynamic model of retail competition and uses it to study the impact of the expansion of a new national competitor on the structure of urban markets. In order to accommodate substantial heterogeneity (both observed and unobserved) across agents and markets, the paper first...