This paper simulates changes to neighborhood home prices resulting from reforms to tax preferences in the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The simulation uses federal tax data summarized at a fine geography to impute homeowner rents at the zip code level across six income classes....

Landlords in high-opportunity neighborhoods screen out tenants using vouchers. In our correspondence experiment, signaling voucher status cuts landlord responses in half. This voucher penalty increases with posted rent and varies little with signals of tenant quality and race. We repeat the...

This paper studies how design features influence the success of Housing Mobility Programs (HMPs) in reducing racial segregation. Targeting neighborhoods based on previous residents' outcomes does not allow for targeting race-specific outcomes, generates uncertainty when targeting income-specific...

We simulate changes to metropolitan area home prices from reforming the Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID). Price simulations are based on an extended user cost model that incorporates two dimensions of behavioral change in home buyers: sensitivity of borrowing and the propensity to use tax...

The Opportunity Atlas (OA) is an innovative data set that ranks neighborhoods according to children’s adult outcomes in several domains, including income. Conceptually, outcomes offer new evidence about neighborhood effects when measured in isolation from neighborhood sorting. This note shows...

For five decades, the share of adults employed in college-degree-intensive industries, such as health care and education, has been rising. Industries that provided employment for workers without degrees, especially manufacturing, have been reducing their payrolls. This economic transition could...

Economists are shifting attention and resources from work on survey data to work on “big data.” This analysis is an empirical exploration of the trade-offs this transition requires. Parallel models are estimated using the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax and the...

Raising the share of adults with college degrees in a region or jurisdiction is a nearly universal goal of regional policymakers. They believe that education, as summarized by this statistic, is the cause of increasing employment, productivity, and wages. Using statistics estimated from the...

In 2009, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which contains Cleveland and 58 other municipalities, created the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation. This land bank was established to acquire low-value properties, mitigate blighted housing, help stabilize neighborhoods, and slow the decline of...

When local governments default or file for bankruptcy, it is often because public officials misunderstood the risks associated with innovative financial products. If unsophisticated municipal bond issuers were to widely adopt a high risk financial product, this could harm taxpayers and...