Not only has poverty recently increased in the United States, it has also become more concentrated. This Commentary documents changes in the concentration of poverty in metropolitan areas over the last decade. The analysis shows that the concentration of poverty tends to be highest in northern...

This paper studies an agent forming beliefs by translating data into signals about the truth of propositions. The agent faces ambiguity when she observes low-quality data yielding set-identified signals. Rules for decision-making under ambiguity choose the single belief generating an extreme...

This paper quantitatively characterizes the “code of the street” from the sociology literature, using the nationally-representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data set to investigate how black young males alter their behavior when living in violent neighborhoods. An...

This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents' outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting income-specific...

This paper quantitatively compares water infrastructure interventions that prioritize equity with those that prioritize efficiency. The community-based model developed by Haiti Outreach (HO) trains communities to operate and maintain wells, and has clear efficiency gains over the status quo aid...

This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents’ outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting...

The Opportunity Atlas (OA) is an innovative data set that ranks neighborhoods according to children’s adult outcomes in several domains, including income. Conceptually, outcomes offer new evidence about neighborhood effects when measured in isolation from neighborhood sorting. This note shows...