The mortgage foreclosure crisis has generated increasing concerns about the effects of foreclosed properties on their surrounding neighborhoods, and on criminal activity in particular. There are a number of potential ways in which a foreclosed property might increase the payoffs to committing...

One reason for the United States’ economic success is the willingness of its residents to follow jobs. Households’ decisions to move depend not only on job prospects but also on the relative cost of housing. I investigate how the housing market affects the flow of workers across cities. This...

Using student-level microdata from 2000–2001 to 2004–2005 from Florida and North Carolina, we compare the effectiveness of teachers in schools serving primarily students from low-income families (70% free-and-reduced-price-lunch students) with teachers in schools serving more advantaged...

Housing developments (condos and suburban developments) are not necessarily homogeneous. Developers provide different types of units of various sizes and other characteristics catering to different types of customers. In this paper, we allow joint production and local consumption externalities...

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) provide supplemental services to urban commercial corridors using funds from member assessments. They have become a very popular urban revitalization tool, but their formation is still largely unexplained. Theory implies that BIDs will form if they add to...

In order to gain a better understanding of the effects of an investment in primary prevention on health, I investigate the impact of treatment of lead-based paint hazards in housing units (the preventive action) on childhood lead poisoning (the health outcome) at the census tract level in...

We study the effect of cultural ties on economic exchange using a novel measure for cultural identity: dialects. We evaluate linguistic micro-data from a unique language survey conducted between 1879 and 1888 in about 45,000 German schools. The recorded geography of dialects comprehensively...

I investigate the effect of improvements to the transportation infrastructure on changes in location patterns of population in Barcelona, Spain between 1991 and 2006. At a census tract level, I verify and extend the finding of Baum-Snow (2007a) that transportation improvements cause...