In the three decades from 1910 to 1940, the fraction of U.S. youths enrolled in public and private secondary schools increased from 18 to 71 percent and the fraction graduating soared from 9 to 51 percent. At the same time, state compulsory education and child labor legislation became more...

We develop a novel strategy to identify the relative importance of school and neighborhood factors in determining school segregation. Using detailed student enrollment and residential location data, our research design compares differences in student composition between adjacent Census blocks...

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...

School districts in the U.S. typically have multiple schools, centralized finance, and student assignment determined by neighborhood of residence. In many states, centralization is extending beyond the district level as states assume an increasing role in the finance of education. At the same...

This paper presents measures of segregation in public schools for metropolitan areas. It shows that, not only are metropolitan areas very segregated, most of that segregation is due to racial disparities between districts rather than segregative patterns within districts. Metropolitan areas in...

Following the example of the Kalamazoo Promise initiated in 2005, place-based "Promise'' scholarship programs have proliferated over the past 8 years. These programs guarantee money towards the costs of attendance at selected colleges and universities provided that a student has resided and...

This paper uses a dynamic competitive spatial equilibrium framework to evaluate the contribution of rural-urban migration induced by structural transformation to the behavior of Chinese housing markets. In the model, technological progress drives workers facing heterogeneous mobility costs to...

We aim to quantify the role of social networks in job-related migration. With over 130 million rural labors migrating to the city each year, China is experiencing the largest internal migration in the human history. Using instrumental variables in the 2006 China Agricultural Census, we find that...

In this paper, we provide a case study of the impact of globalization on income inequality using data across Chinese regions. The literature on cross-country studies has been criticized because differences in legal systems and other institutions across countries are difficult to control for, and...

This paper studies the welfare effects of encouraging rural-urban migration in the developing world. To do so, we build a dynamic incomplete-markets model of migration in which heterogenous agents face seasonal income fluctuations, stochastic income shocks, and disutility of migration that...