If someone lives in an economically depressed place, they were probably born there. The presence of people with local ties – a preference to live in their birthplace – leads to smaller migration responses. Smaller migration responses to wage declines lead to lower real incomes and make real...

We study the effects on employment, costs of living, and income inequality of local shocks in the housing market or in the productivity of a tradable good. We construct a two-region search and matching model in which housing is considered a necessity good. Mobility of labor implies that any...

This paper studies how U.S. local labor markets respond to employment losses that occur during recessions. Following recessions from 1973 through 2009, we find that areas that lose more jobs during the recession experience persistent relative declines in employment and population. Most...

When mobility between locations is frictional, a person's economic well-being is partially determined by her place of birth. Using a life cycle model of mobility, we find that search frictions are the main impairment to the mobility of young people in Spain, and these frictions are particularly...

An unappreciated potential benefit of commuting subsidies is that they can expand the choice set of feasible job opportunities in a way that facilitates a better job match quality. Variations in wages and initial commuting distances, combined with major reforms of the commuting subsidy formula...

This paper proposes a novel empirical strategy to estimate the causal effects of federal "redlining" - the mapping and grading of US neighborhoods by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). In the late 1930s, a federal agency created color-coded maps to summarize the financial risk of granting...

We investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic characteristics...

Seit 2006 gilt in Deutschland das Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz - auch für den Wohnungsmarkt. Die vorliegenden Berechnungen auf Basis des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels zeigen jedoch, dass Mieterinnen und Mieter mit Migrationshintergrund deutschlandweit im Jahr 2013 durchschnittlich knapp elf...