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Report
Housing markets and residential segregation: impacts of the Michigan school finance reform on inter- and intra-district sorting
Local financing of public schools in the United States leads to a bundling of two distinct choices ? residential choice and school choice ? and has been argued to increase the degree of socioeconomic segregation across school districts. A school finance reform, aimed at equalization of school finances, can in principle weaken this link between housing choice and choice of schools. In this paper, we study the impacts of the Michigan school finance reform of 1994 (Proposal A) on spatial segregation. The reform was a state initiative intended to equalize per-pupil expenditures between Michigan ...
Working Paper
Household Mortgage Refinancing Decisions Are Neighbor Influenced
Can social influence effects help explain regional heterogeneity in refinancing activity? Neighborhood social influence effects have been shown to affect publicly observable decisions, but their role in private decisions, like refinancing, remains unclear. Using precisely geolocated data and a nearest-neighbor research design, we find that households are 7% more likely to refinance if a neighbor within 50 meters has recently refinanced. Consistent with a word-of-mouth mechanism, social influence effects are weaker when neighbors are farther away and non existent for non-occupants. Our results ...
Discussion Paper
The Power of Proximity: How Working beside Colleagues Affects Training and Productivity
Firms remain divided about the value of the office for “office” workers. Some firms think that their employees are more productive when working from home. Others believe that the office is a key place for investing in workers’ skills. In this post, which is based on a recent working paper, we examine whether both sides could be right: Could working in the office facilitate investments in workers’ skills for tomorrow that diminish productivity today?
Working Paper
Peer Effects and Marriage Formation
A large literature links marriage to later life outcomes for children and adults. Marriage has declined markedly in the U.S. over the last 50 years, particularly among individuals with less than a baccalaureate degree, yet the causes of the decline are not well understood. In this paper we provide causal evidence on one potential mechanism for the observed marriage rate patterns: peer effects. We use administrative personnel data from the U.S. Army to study how peers influence marriage decisions for junior enlisted soldiers arriving to their first assignment from 2001-2018, a setting which ...