This paper hypothesizes that segregation in US cities increases as racial inequality narrows due to the emergence of middle-class black neighborhoods. Employing a novel research design based on life-cycle variations in the relationship between segregation and inequality, we test this hypothesis...

This paper develops a comprehensive framework for estimating household preferences for school and neighborhood attributes in the presence of sorting. It embeds a boundary discontinuity design in a heterogeneous model of residential choice to address the endogeneity of school and neighborhood...

In cities throughout the United States, blacks tend to live in significantly poorer and lower-amenity neighborhoods than whites. An obvious first-order explanation for this is that an individual''s race is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status (SES), and poorer households can only afford...

Prompted by widespread concerns about public school quality, a growing empirical literature has measured the effects of greater choice on school performance. This paper contributes to that literature in three ways. First, it makes the observation that the overall effect of greater choice, which...

Black households in the United States with high levels of income and education (SES) typically face a stark tradeoff when deciding where to live. They can choose neighborhoods with high levels of public goods or a high proportion of blacks, but very few neighborhoods combine both, a fact we...

In many theoretical public finance models, school quality plays a central role as a determinant of household location choices and in turn, of neighborhood stratification. In contrast, the recent empirical literature has almost universally concluded that the direct effect of school quality on...

This paper introduces an equilibrium framework for analyzing residential sorting, designed to take advantage of newly available restricted-access Census microdata. The framework adds an equilibrium concept to the discrete choice framework developed by McFadden (1973, 1978), permitting a more...

This paper uses unique panel data covering over two million repeat-sales housing transactions from four metropolitan areas to test for the presence of racial price differentials in the housing market. Drawing on the strengths of these data, our research design controls carefully for unobserved...

Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income. Typically, urban areas are less than fully stratified, and the question arises...

This paper develops a dynamic model of neighborhood choice along with a computationally light multi-step estimator. The proposed empirical framework captures observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity across households and locations in a flexible way. The model is estimated using a newly...