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...

I study the impact of transportation on health in the rural US, 1820-1847. Measuring health by average stature, I find that greater transportation linkage, as measured by market access, in a cohort's county-year of birth had an adverse impact on its health. A one-standard deviation increase in...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability, and in contrast with the alternative hypothesis that it might forestall political capture. We then provide direct...

Life expectancy varies substantially across local regions within a country, raising conjectures that place of residence affects health. However, population sorting and other confounders make it difficult to disentangle the effects of place on health from other geographic differences in life...

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...

We show that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), from its inception in the 1930s, did not insure mortgages in low income urban neighborhoods where the vast majority of urban Black Americans lived. The agency evaluated neighborhoods using block-level information collected by New Deal relief...

We leverage a natural experiment in combination with data on adolescents' time preferences to assess whether there is heterogeneity in place effects on adolescent obesity. We exploit the plausibly exogenous assignment of military servicemembers, and consequently their children, to different...

Since the '80s the US has experienced not only a steady increase in income inequality, but also a contemporaneous increase in residential segregation by income. Using US Census data, we first document a positive correlation between inequality and segregation at the MSA level between 1980 and...

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...

Researchers and policy-makers have explored the possibility of restricting the use of housing vouchers to neighborhoods that may positively affect the outcomes of children. Using the framework of a dynamic model of optimal location choice, we estimate preferences over neighborhoods of likely...