For thousands of years, the Chinese and many other nations around the workd built defensive walls around their cities. This phenomenon is not well understood from an economic perspective. To rationalize the existence of city walls, we propose a simple model that relates the deimesions of city...

This paper studies purely empirically aspects of the distribution of income within small neighborhoods and contrasts it with the income distribution at higher level of aggregation, such as census tracts and metropolitan areas. It relies on a unique feature of the American Housing Survey, whose...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale...

This paper develops a model of housing decisions which allows for social interactions within residential neighborhoods to impact homeowners' valuation of their own properties. The model is used to structure an empirical investigation with data from the American Housing Survey for 1985 and 1989....

The paper adapts to richer social structures the Brock-Durlauf model of interactive discrete choice, where individuals’ decisions are influenced by the decisions of others. Social structure is modelled by a description of who interacts with whom, by means of a graph, with individuals as...

The paper seeks to contribute to the social interactions literature by exploiting data on individual's self- selection into neighborhoods. We study a model in which households search for the best location in the presence of neighborhood effects in the formation of children's human capital and in...

Urban growth refers to the process of growth and decline of economic agglomerations. The pattern of concentration of economic activity, and its evolution, has been found to be an important determinant, and in some cases the result, of urbanization, the structure of cities, the organization of...

The paper describes within-neighborhood economic segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 1985 and 1993. It uses the neighborhood clusters of the American Housing Survey, standardized by metropolitan area income and household size, to explore income distribution within neighborhoods at a scale...