Does crime in a neighborhood cause future crime? Without a source of quasi-experimental variation in local crime, we develop an identification strategy that leverages a recently developed test of exogeneity (Caetano (2015)) to select a feasible regression model for causal inference. Using a...

We develop a novel strategy to identify the relative importance of school and neighborhood factors in determining school segregation. Using detailed student enrollment and residential location data, our research design compares differences in student composition between adjacent Census blocks...

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to test for the presence of debt aversion. The population who participated in the experiment were recent financial aid candidates and the experiment focused on student loans. The goal is to shed new light on different aspects of the...

The “Broken Windows†theory of crime prescribes “zero-tolerance†law enforcement policies that disproportionately target light crimes with the understanding that this will lead to future reductions of more severe crimes. We provide evidence against the effectiveness of such...

We introduce an empirical framework that synthesizes the key insights of the Schelling model of segregation. Our framework builds upon an established empirical literature in neighborhood choice and can accommodate complex, realistic features that have been absent from prior analyses of tipping...