Youths who share a school and neighborhood often have similar academic achievement, but some studies find all or most of this apparent effect is due to sorting, not to the neighborhood itself. We present a collage of evidence from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) indicating...

There is a seeming paradox about the "affordable housing goals": GSE activities in targeted communities have increased under the goals but there has been little measurable improvement in housing market conditions in these communities. This paper seeks to reconcile this paradox by focusing on...

This is the first time in U.S. history that an urban planning problem has featured, if peripherally, as a Presidential campaign issue. Never before have academic urban planners been in so much demand for T.V. news programs, radio talk shows, and newspaper op-ed pieces. Why? Because of a raging...

This paper examines the effect of space and race/ethnicity on labor force participation outcomes among minority and immigrant youth in the Los Angeles metropolitan areas. This research contributes to the spatial mismatch literature by analyzing the differences between first and second generation...

Adam Smith was one of the first to call attention to economic growth differences among nations. He described how the workings of markets, specifically the extent of specialization in production, offer a plausible explanation of these differentials. This idea has been enriched over the years with...

While there has been considerable research empirically quantifying and simulating the roleof borrowing constraints on homeownership rates, the primary focus of this work has been onmeasuring the relative importance of income and wealth constraints with respect to ownershipoutcomes. An important...

This paper seeks to answer the question of why Entertainment Retail Centers (ERCs) develop as they do and what we can expect from these centers of consumption in the near future. Beginning with a "network" view of cities, where cities are nodes in an integrated economic system, the paper...

Housing policy under the Clinton and Bush Administrations has sought to boost homeownership while also narrowing racial gaps in owner-occupancy rates. Against that backdrop, homeownership rose sharply in the 1990s, but white-minority gaps remain in excess of 25 percentage points. We analyze...

This paper extends unobserved heterogeneity to the multinomial logit model (MNL) framework in the context of mortgages terminated by refinance, move, or default. It tests for the importance of unobserved heterogeneity when borrower characteristics such as income, age and credit score are...

The transformation of the Polish economy during the early 1990s offers an unusual opportunityto examine the evolution of a new market for urban land. There has been a great deal oftheoretical and empirical research focused on urban land value functions that has derived fromthe work of Muth...