This paper surveys the modern economics literature on the role of neighborhoods in influencing socioeconomic outcomes. Neighborhood effects have been analyzed in a range of theoretical and applied contexts and have proven to be of interest in understanding questions ranging from the asymptotic properties of various evolutionary games to explaining the persistence of poverty in inner cities. As such, the survey covers a range of theoretical, econometric and empirical topics. One conclusion from the survey is that there is a need to better integrate findings from theory and econometrics into empirical studies; until this is done, empirical studies of the nature and magnitude of neighborhood effects are unlikely to persuade those skeptical about their importance.
