Journal of Urban Economics最新文献

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status suburban Californian school districts from 2000–2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in these higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

How have the longer journeys to work faced by Black commuters evolved in the United States over the last four decades? Black commuters spent 49 more minutes commuting per week in 1980 than White commuters; this difference declined to 22 minutes per week in 2019. Two factors account for the majority of the difference: Black workers are more likely to commute by transit, and Black workers make up a larger share of the population in cities with long average commutes. Increases in car commuting by Black workers account for nearly one quarter of the decline in the racialized difference in commute times between 1980 and 2019. Today, commute times have mostly converged (conditional on observables) for car commuters in small- and mid-sized cities. In contrast, differential job access today drives persistent differences of commute times, particularly in large, congested, and expensive cities.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals granted more than 900,000 temporary work permits to eligible immigrants. I estimate the impact of the policy on the labor market outcomes of natives and immigrants ineligible to take up the policy using ACS data and a continuous difference-in-differences strategy to compare individuals who are more and less exposed to the eligible population. I find that DACA does not depress labor market outcomes for natives, and possibly increases the fraction working. I also find that the policy likely had no impact on ineligible immigrants.

Since 1980, over 2,000 local governments in US Atlantic states have been hit by a hurricane. We study local government fiscal dynamics in the aftermath of hurricanes. These shocks reduce tax revenues, public expenditures, and debt financing in the decade following a hurricane. Hurricanes create collateral fiscal damage for local governments by increasing the cost of debt at critical moments after a strike. Municipalities with a 1 standard deviation-above-average racial minority composition suffer expenditure losses more than 2 times larger and debt default risk 8 times larger than the average municipalities in the decade following a hurricane strike.

We examine the response to entry in a large market with differentiated products using a novel longitudinal dataset of over 550,000 New York City restaurant menus from 68 consecutive weeks. We compare “treated” restaurants facing a nearby entrant to “control” restaurants with no new competition, matching restaurants using location characteristics and a pairwise distance measure based on menu text. Restaurants frequently adjust prices and product offerings but we find no evidence that they respond differentially to new competition. However, restaurants in locations with an entrant count in the top decile—areas with many new competitors—are 22% more likely to exit after a year than restaurants in the lowest entry decile.

Does the power of reference points mean that minute differences in a purchase price then reverberate in future sales prices? In this research, I show that if previous sales prices are round numbers, defined as multiples of £1,000 (e.g. £231,000), subsequent sales prices entail a considerable premium relative to similar properties that were previously priced at charm numbers that are marginally below those round numbers (e.g. £230,999 or £230,950). Using a sample of repeat sales from the Greater London region from 1995 to 2017, I estimate the premium to be approximately 4 percent after controlling for property characteristics and a large set of fixed effects. Increasing public accessibility of information attenuates the effect. Tax considerations, financial constraints, and pricing errors cannot explain the result. I propose a framework of reference dependence and left-digit bias to explain the result, highlighting the presence of behavioural biases in household decisions, even when very high stakes are involved.

Current research documents astonishingly large price discounts for foreclosures and short sales. However, such outsized estimates may largely be due to omitted variables bias. We propose an innovative methodology relying on appraisers’ ability to match properties along both observable and unobservable attributes when performing appraisals. Our empirical approach, which relies on the use of appraisal fixed effects, produces foreclosure and short sale discounts of approximately 5% after controlling for a rich set of characteristics, including quality and condition, attributable mostly to the stigma associated with distress itself. We show that these lower estimates are not due to appraisers selecting high-price distressed properties as comps and are robust across a wide variety of subsamples and under alternative estimation methods.

Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts are the largest economic development program in the City of Chicago allocating nearly $1 billion in tax revenues annually. This paper uses comprehensive data on employment by place of work and place of residency to study if TIF districts see an increase in jobs as a result of designation, and whether the residents in neighborhoods designated as TIF districts see employment benefits from the designation. To account for the endogenous selection of TIF areas, I implement a propensity score matching dynamic difference-in-differences approach exploiting differential timing of TIF designation. I find that TIF designation increases the number of jobs in a selected census block by approximately 15% over 5 years. However, the employment levels of residents living in or around TIF districts shows no increase due to designation. I also find evidence of substantial spillover effects to adjacent blocks, and limited neighborhood compositional changes. These findings suggest that TIF districts can be effective in revitalizing commercial and industrial areas while the ability of TIF to improve outcomes in blighted residential neighborhoods surrounding the district is limited.

This paper estimates the effects of crime risk on housing values. To estimate the causal effects, we rely on the introduction of the gun offender registry in Baltimore City, Maryland, that discloses the residences of ex-gun offenders to the public. Specifically, we exploit the changes in perceived crime risk after ex-gun offenders move into the neighborhoods. Our most conservative estimates indicate that houses within 0.1 miles from ex-gun offenders’ residences experience an 8.0% decline in value ($12,632) after these ex-gun offenders move in. Additional results suggest that homeowners are responding out of fear of victimization as we do not observe significant increases in crimes following the relocation of ex-gun offenders into the neighborhoods.

Urban housing markets are characterized by racial sorting, but equilibrium prices respond to marginal buyers and thus may mask underlying preferences for segregation. Large migration shocks can make visible these otherwise infra-marginal preferences. We study the effects of Hurricane Katrina-induced displacement on housing markets in receiving neighborhoods in Texas, where 1 in 5 New Orleanians relocated. Using an event study design, we find that the relocation of 100 additional Katrina survivors to a receiving ZIP code is associated with a 2.2% decline in relative house prices five years after the storm. This effect is driven by responses to movers from predominantly Black origin blocks. We argue that our findings are best explained by a preference for segregation on the part of incumbent White residents. In this case, racial stratification in the effect of a disaster is followed by racial stratification in economic responses.