The portion of the South known as the Black Belt lies at the heart of what was once the cotton-and-tobacco plantation region and retains a large black population. Despite the Black Belt's high poverty rates and relatively slow economic growth, its large net loss of blacks to urban areas over the...

A striking negative correlation exists between an area's residential racial segregation and its population characteristics, but it is recognized that this relationship may not be causal. I present a novel test of causality from segregation to population characteristics by exploiting the...

This paper reviews the evidence on the efficacy of neighborhood and school interventions in improving the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. We focus on studies exploiting exogenous sources of variation in neighborhoods and schools and which examine at least medium-term...

This study focuses on testing the relationship between income inequality and economic growth within counties in the United States, and the channels through which the effects of a relationship are observed. Based on a system of equations estimation, the empirical results confirm the hypotheses...

This paper examines the wage gap between migrants and non-migrants in large cities in Vietnam. It finds that migrants receive substantially lower wages than non-migrants. The wage gap tends to be larger for older migrants. However, once observed demographic characteristics of workers are...

The objective of this paper is to provide some empirical evidence of relevant risk factors and causal mechanisms to understand criminal behavior in Romania. In order to achieve this goal, some socio-economic variables are considered: long-term unemployment rate and people at risk of poverty or...

A "poverty trap" can be understood as a set of self-reinforcing mechanisms whereby countries start poor and remain poor: poverty begets poverty, so that current poverty is itself a direct cause of poverty in the future. The idea of a poverty trap has this striking implication for policy: much...

The global expansion of urban slums poses questions for economic research as well as problems for policymakers. We provide evidence that the type of poverty observed in contemporary slums of the developing world is characteristic of that described in the literature on poverty traps. We document...

We study the local effects of a federal program that helped cities clear areas for redevelopment, rehabilitate structures, complete city plans, and enforce building codes. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the program's effects on city-level measures of income, property...