When the fraction of minorities in a neighborhood exceeds the tipping point white flight accelerates. I develop a revealed-preference method to estimate the tipping points of 38,000 census tracts and the preferences of households for minority neighbors in the 123 Metropolitan Statistical Areas...

In this study we quantify the life-cycle effects of human and health capital on the wage distribution of females, with a focus on health measured by body mass. We use NLSY79 data on women followed annually up to twenty years during the time of their lives when average annual weight gain is...

The behavioral revolution within economics has been largely driven by psychological insights, with the sister sciences playing a lesser role. This study leverages insights from sociology to explore the role of neighborhoods on human capital formation at an early age. We do so by estimating the...

This study exploits experimental variation in parent human capital (early-life school-based deworming) and a shock to schooling (extended Covid closures) to estimate how these factors interact in the production of child human capital within a sample of 3,500 Kenyan 3-8 year olds. Parents with...

Recent policy debates on closing the education gender gap in developing countries have focused on cash transfers, but standard models of intrahousehold allocation imply that reducing the opportunity cost of girls' schooling might also be effective. I test this prediction using quasi-experimental...

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...

Sociologists have shown that "third places" such as neighborhood cafés help people maintain and use their network ties. Do they help local entrepreneurs, for whom networks are important? We examine whether the introduction of Starbucks cafés into U.S. neighborhoods with no coffee shops...

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...

Recent research documents a causal impact of place on the long-run outcomes of children. However, little is known about which neighborhood characteristics are most important, and at what scale neighborhood effects operate. By using the random assignment of public housing along with...

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial...