How does one's place of residence affect individual behavior and long-run outcomes? Understanding neighborhood and place effects has been a leading question for social scientists during the past half-century. Recent empirical studies using experimental and quasi-experimental research designs...

Although non-experimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this paper compares experimental and non-experimental...

Urban change involves transformations in the physical appearance and the social composition of neighborhoods. Yet, the relationship between the physical and social components of urban change is not well understood due to the lack of comprehensive measures of neighborhood appearance. Here, we...

We define educational access as the component of a neighborhood's value that is determined by the set of schools available to its residents. This paper studies the extent to which educational access is determined by sorting based on heterogeneous preferences over school attributes, or local...

Whether contemporary households consider the race of their neighbors when choosing a neighborhood is controversial. We study neighborhood choice using a novel research design that contrasts the move rate of homeowners who receive a new different-race neighbor nearby to that of homeowners who...

We study how recent gentrification shocks impact Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, including where minority households move to after a shock and if the subsequent spatial distribution of households within a labor market area affects segregation. We first report that household moves from a given...

We provide novel estimates of the timing, magnitudes, and potential determinants of the start of the last housing boom across American neighborhoods and metropolitan areas (MSAs) using a rich new micro data set containing 23 million housing transactions in 94 metropolitan areas between 1993 and...

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...

Using a large field experiment, we show that racial composition of employer neighborhoods predicts employment discrimination patterns in a direction suggesting in-group bias. Our data also show racial disparities in the geographic distribution of job postings. Simulations illustrate how these...

This paper presents a new framework to estimate preferences for neighborhoods in the presence of individual imperfect information about every amenity in each neighborhood. We estimate the model with data from a new neighborhood choice program that provided information about market rents and...