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Working Paper
The Bronx is Burning: Urban Disinvestment Effects of the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements
In response to private insurers’ postwar withdrawal from urban neighborhoods, roughly half of U.S. states developed programs in the late 1960s that offered residual property insurance to property owners denied in the private market. These plans, known as Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) plans after 1968, inadvertently encouraged moral hazard through underwriting restrictions, risk pooling, and generous payouts. We use a triple-difference design to estimate FAIR’s impact, comparing: (1) pre- and post-FAIR participation periods, (2) neighborhoods likely offered FAIR plans versus ...
Newsletter
How Similar Are Credit Scores Across Generations?
With the rise in economic inequality in the United States in recent decades, there has been growing concern about whether there is a sufficient degree of equality of opportunity in our society. Policymakers and researchers alike often focus on studies of intergenerational mobility as a way of assessing opportunity. These studies typically analyze distinct aspects of socioeconomic status, such as income, education, occupational status, and health, and measure the association in these outcomes between parents and their adult children.1 If the association (level of similarity) is very high, then ...
What Can Geolocation Data Tell Us About Childcare Use and Accessibility?
In the U.S., many parents of young children may not have enough childcare providers near them, which may limit not only their childcare access but also their employment opportunities. In this article, we explore how data on people’s visiting patterns to childcare providers might help inform our understanding of the geographic distances between where families live and where providers operate, as well as how these distances and the capacity of providers can affect childcare access. Our research is part of the Chicago Fed’s Spotlight on Childcare and the Labor Market, a targeted effort to ...
Journal Article
Urban decline in rust-belt cities
Many Rust-Belt cities have seen almost half their populations move from inside the city borders to the surrounding suburbs and elsewhere since the 1970s. As populations shifted, neighborhoods changed?in their average income, educational profile, and housing prices. But the shift did not happen in every neighborhood at the same rate. Recent research has uncovered some of the patterns characterizing the process.>
Newsletter
How Common Was Blockbusting in the Postwar U.S.?
This article documents the prevalence of blockbusting—the orchestration of racial turnover in urban neighborhoods—throughout many major U.S. cities from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Journal Article
The impact of foreclosures on the housing market
A record number of mortgage loans are either in default or in danger of being defaulted upon. Many of the properties that back these loans will end up going through the foreclosure process. A growing body of research shows that foreclosed homes sell at a discount and that foreclosures have a negative impact on the value of other homes that are nearby. The effect on nearby property values happens for two different reasons, but my recent work suggests that one or the other predominates depending on certain characteristics of the neighborhood where the foreclosures are occurring. This finding ...
Working Paper
The Effects of the Great Migration on Urban Renewal
The Great Migration significantly increased the number of African Americans moving to northern and western cities beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that their arrival shaped slum clearance and urban redevelopment efforts in receiving cities. To estimate the effect of migrants, we instrument for Black population changes using a shift-share instrument that interacts historical migration patterns with local economic shocks that predict Black out-migration from the South. We find that local governments responded by undertaking more urban renewal projects that aimed to ...
Working Paper
Are America's Inner Cities Competitive? Evidence from the 2000s
In the years since Michael Porter?s paper about the potential competitiveness of inner cities there has been growing evidence of a residential resurgence in urban neighborhoods. Yet, there is less evidence on the competitiveness of inner cities for employment. We document the trends in net employment growth and find that inner cities gained over 1.8 million jobs between 2002 and 2011 at a rate comparable to suburban areas. We also find a significant number of inner cities are competitive over this period?increasing their share of metropolitan employment in 120 out of 281 MSAs. We also ...
Working Paper
Preferences over the Racial Composition of Neighborhoods: Estimates and Implications
We estimate the parameters of a dynamic, forward-looking neighborhood choice model in 197 metro areas where households have preferences over the racial composition of neighborhoods. Our inclusion of multiple metro areas in the estimation sample enables us to develop a new, shift-share IV strategy to estimate the impact of the racial composition of neighborhoods on location choice that relies only on across-metro comparisons of similarly situated neighborhoods. For the “shift,” we use national data to determine the probabilities different types of households live in different neighborhoods ...
Journal Article
Housing recovery: how far have we come?
Four years into the economic recovery, housing markets have finally started to improve. While many indicators of activity indicate recent growth, comparing over time and across the United States suggests that many regional housing markets are looking better now only in comparison to where they were during the recession. The recovery in housing markets does appear to be gaining steam, but it remains a work in progress in many places.