Much research attention has been devoted to community context and health. Communities are often defined as residential spaces, such as neighborhoods, or as social groupings, such as caste in India. Using data from a group of tea estates in South India, we attempt to address important...

The Gautreaux data for this paper were created with the assistance of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities under special agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the National Center for Health Statistics. Generous support for data construction...

Immigrants to the United States walk, bicycle, and use transit and carpools more than U.S.-born residents do. These differences persist over time and across income groups. The differences appear strongest when immigrants reside in immigrant neighborhoods with high concentrations of other...

This paper analyzes job referral effects that are based on residential location. We use geo-referenced record data for the entire working population and the corresponding establishments in the German Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area. We estimate the propensity of two persons to work at the same...

Indirect psychological effects induced by crime are likely to contribute significantly to the total costs of crime beyond the financial costs of direct victimization. Using detailed crime statistics for the whole of Germany and linking them to individual-level mental health information from the...

This paper explores how diversity affects individuals’ employment prospects, using data from the French Labor Force Survey. Employment correlates positively with local labor market diversity, but negatively with neighborhood diversity. Using an instrumental variable approach to deal with local...

Neighborhood disadvantage has consistently been linked to increased rates of morbidity and mortality, but the mechanisms through which neighborhood environments may get “under the skin” remain largely unknown. Differential exposure to chronic environmental stressors has been identified as a...

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits is an important concern in the policy debate. There are strong variations in absence behavior among local geographical areas. Such variations are difficult to explain in terms of observable socioeconomic factors. In this...

Extant observational studies generally support the existence of a link between neighborhood context and health. However, estimating the causal impact of neighborhood effects from observational data has proven to be a challenge. Omission of relevant factors may lead to overestimating the effects...

We examine spatial spillovers in institutional development. Dependent variables are institutional measures reflecting politics, law, and governmental administration. The explanatory variable of interest is the level of institutions in bordering countries—a spatial lag of the dependent...