Appropriately constructed measures of the quality of life and the quality of the business environment should be important determinants of the growth and composition of population across urban areas. This paper examines that question by extending theoretical measures of household quality of life...

This paper documents and explains previously unrecognized post-crash dynamics following the collapse of a housing bubble. A simple model predicts that speculative developers ensure stable pre-crash relative prices between small and large homes while their post-crash exit allows small-home...

This paper reviews recent literature that considers and explains the tendency for neighborhood and city-level economic status to rise and fall. A central message is that although many locations exhibit extreme persistence in economic status, change in economic status as measured by various...

While homeownership rates currently stand at historically high levels for all segments of the U.S. population, large gaps are present comparing various groups of the population. As of the third quarter of 2006, the non-Hispanic white homeownership rate was 76 percent while black and Hispanic...

Homeownership rates equal the number of households that own homes divided by the number of households in the population. Differences in the propensity to form a household, therefore, may contribute to changes in homeownership rates over time in addition to longstanding racial gaps in...

As of the fourth quarter of 2005, 76 percent of white non-Hispanic families owned homes, but only 50 percent of Hispanic families. We argue that low rates of homeownership in Hispanic communities create a self-reinforcing mechanism that contributes to this large disparity. In part, this occurs...

A conventional argument in the child-labour debate is that improvements in access to schools are an effective way to reduce the labour force participation of children. It is argued that schooling competes with economic activity in the use of children's time, and enhanced access to schools,...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this paper investigates the effect of plausible credit constraints on the cyclicality of teen college enrolments. It is found that teens from wealthier families are more likely to attend college in regional recessions. However,...

The decisions of young adults from non-metropolitan areas to either migrate to metropolitan areas or remain in non-metropolitan areas following the completion of schooling are studied in this paper. The migration decision is decomposed into an hourly initial earnings component and a cost...

This paper examines gender differences in the sensitivity of primary school enrollment to the costs of post-primary schooling in rural Pakistan. Of all measures of the costs of schooling, only distance from primary school is found to be a statistically significant determinant of female primary...