Areas differ in their propensity to experience natural disasters. Exposure to disaster risks can be reduced either through migration (i.e., self-protection) or through public infrastructure investment (e.g., building seawalls). Using migration data from the 1920s and 1930s, this paper studies...

This paper argues that long-run trends in geographic segregation are inconsistent with models where residential choice depends solely on local public goods (the Tiebout hypothesis). We develop an extension of the Tiebout model that predicts as mobility costs fall, the heterogeneity across...

We present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007. Black ownership increased by 46 percentage points, whereas white ownership increased by 20 points. Remarkably, 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910. Part of this early convergence...

Written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the <em>American Economic Review</em>, this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its members, one of which is the...</em>