Theory suggests that spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups can have both positive and negative effects on the economic performance of minorities. Racial segregation may be damaging because it curtails informational connections with the larger community or because concentrations of...

Equally educated people are healthier if they live in more educated places. Every 10 percent point increase in an area's share of adults with a college degree is associated with a decline in all-cause mortality by 7%, controlling for individual education, demographics, and area characteristics....

In the presence of moving costs, individuals may remain in a region even when they expect to attain a higher standard of living elsewhere. When a natural disaster or other exogenous shock forces individuals to move, the net impact on living standards could be positive or negative. This paper...

Many observers argue that urban revitalization harms the poor, primarily by raising rents. Others argue that urban decline harms the poor by reducing job opportunities, the quality of local public services, and other neighborhood amenities. While both decay and revitalization can have negative...

Why do voters at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum support political candidates who generally disfavor redistributive policies? Existing explanations often presume that voters are explicitly acting in opposition to their economic self-interest, or that they hold persistently optimistic...

The black-white earnings gap has historically been larger in the South than in other regions of the United States. Since 1970, however, the male annual earnings gap outside the South has increased -- dramatically, when the analysis factors in non-participants -- while the gap within the South...

This paper employs a simple intertemporal model to show that presence of liquidity constraints can depress the price of a durable good below its net present rental value, regardless of the overall supply elasticity. The existence of price effects implies that the relaxation of liquidity...

The boundary discontinuity method of causal inference may yield misleading results if a policy's impacts do not stop at the border of the implementing jurisdiction. We use geographically precise longitudinal employment data documenting worker job-to-job mobility to study policy spillovers in the...

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. The U.S. evidence on this assumption has been inconclusive because of distortions from reporting error in household surveys. Following a British literature, we...

Does differential access to computer technology at home compound the educational disparities between rich and poor? Would a program of government provision of computers to early secondary school students reduce these disparities? We use administrative data on North Carolina public school...