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...

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...

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...

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...

We posit that historical resource scarcities played a role in the emergence of gender norms inimical to women that persist to this day. This thesis is supported by our finding that nations’ historical resource endowments, as measured by the historical availability of arable land, are...

failures. As competition between public and private healthcare facilities has a

This paper examines the effect of household access to microcredit upon work by seven to eleven year old children in rural Malawi. Given that microcredit organizations foster household enterprises wherein much child labor is engaged, this paper aims to discover whether access to microcredit might...

Single female-headed families with children (SFHFwC) have historically been the primary recipients of federal public cash assistance payments in the United States. Recent welfare reform initiatives established work requirements and cumulative time limits on public cash assistance payments. Three...