Search Results
Showing results 1 to 7 of approximately 7.
(refine search)
Working Paper
Urban Renewal and Inequality: Evidence from Chicago’s Public Housing Demolitions
This paper studies one of the largest spatially targeted redevelopment efforts implemented in the United States: public housing demolitions sponsored by the HOPE VI program. Focusing on Chicago, we study welfare and racial disparities in the impacts of demolitions using a structural model that features a rich set of equilibrium responses. Our results indicate that demolitions had notably heterogeneous effects where welfare decreased for low-income minority households and increased for White households. Counterfactual simulations explore how housing policy mitigates negative effects of ...
Working Paper
Did Racially Motivated Labor Policy Reverse Equality Gains for Everyone?
Labor protection policies in the 1950s and 1960s helped many low- and middle-wage white workers in the United States achieve the American Dream. This coincided with historically low levels of inequality across income deciles. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, policies that had previously helped build the white middle class reversed, especially in states with a larger Black population. Calibrating a labor search model to match minimum wages, unemployment benefits, and bargaining power before and after the Civil Rights Act, I find declining labor protections explain half of the rise in 90/10 ...
Working Paper
The Effects of Racial Segregation on Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from Historical Railroad Placement
This paper provides new evidence on the causal impacts of citywide racial segregation on intergenerational mobility. We use an instrumental variable approach that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in segregation due to the arrangement of railroad tracks in the 19th century. Our analysis finds that higher segregation reduces upward mobility for Black children from households across the income distribution and White children from low-income households. Moreover, segregation lowers academic achievement while increasing incarceration and teenage birth rates. An analysis of mechanisms shows ...
Working Paper
Neighborhood Dynamics and the Distribution of Opportunity
Wilson (1987) argued that policies ending racial discrimination would not equalize opportunity without addressing residential sorting and neighborhood externalities. This paper studies related counterfactual policies using an overlapping-generations dynamic general equilibrium model of residential sorting and intergenerational human capital accumulation. In the model, households choose where to live and how much to invest toward the production of their child?s human capital. The return on parents? investment is determined in part by the child?s ability and in part by an externality determined ...
Working Paper
A Racial Inequality Trap
Why has the U.S. black/white earnings gap remained around 40 percent for nearly 40 years? This paper''s answer consists of a model of skill accumulation and neighborhood formation featuring a trap: Initial racial inequality and racial preferences induce racial segregation and asymmetric skill accumulation choices that perpetuate racial inequality. Calibrated to match the U.S. distribution of race, house prices and earnings across neighborhoods, the model produces one-half of the observed racial earnings gap. Moving the economy from the trap to a racially integrated steady state implies a 15.6 ...
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 ...
Working Paper
Civil Liberties and Social Structure
Governments use coercion to aggregate distributed information relevant to governmental objectives—from the prosecution of regime-stability threats to terrorism or epidemics. A cohesive social structure facilitates this task, as reliable information will often come from friends and acquaintances. A cohesive citizenry can more easily exercise collective action to resist such intrusions, however. We present an equilibrium theory where this tension mediates the joint determination of social structure and civil liberties. We show that segregation and unequal treatment sustain each other as ...