This paper introduces a mechanism that, contrary to standard reasoning, may lead segregation in U.S. cities to increase as racial inequality narrows. Speci fically, when the proportion of highly educated blacks rises holding white education fi xed, new middle-class black neighborhoods can...

This paper presents a new approach for measuring the effects of competition on school performance. We use an equilibrium sorting model to generate an intuitive measure of the competition each school faces, captured by the slope of the school’s demand curve. We then show that this competition...

This paper presents a new equilibrium framework for analyzing economic and policy questions related to the sorting of households within a large metropolitan area. We estimate the model using restricted-access Census data that precisely characterize residential and employment locations for...

This paper sheds new light on the forces that drive residential segregation on the basis of race, assessing the extent to which across-race differences in other household characteristics can explain a significant portion of observed racial segregation. The central contribution of the analysis is...

This paper develops a dynamic model of neighborhood choice along with a computationally light multi-step estimator. The proposed empirical framework captures observed and unobserved preference heterogeneity across households and locations in a flexible way. The model is estimated using a newly...