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 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...

Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting (in the simplest instance) a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities, ordered by household income. In practice, urban areas tend to exhibit varying degrees of...

Tiebout's classic 1956 paper has strong implications regarding stratification across and within jurisdictions, predicting in the simplest instance a hierarchy of internally homogeneous communities ordered by income. Typically, urban areas are less than fully stratified, and the question arises...

Black households in the United States with high levels of income and education (SES) typically face a stark tradeoff when deciding where to live. They can choose neighborhoods with high levels of public goods or a high proportion of blacks, but very few neighborhoods combine both, a fact we...

In cities throughout the United States, blacks tend to live in significantly poorer and lower-amenity neighborhoods than whites. An obvious first-order explanation for this is that an individual%u2019%u2019s race is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status (SES), and poorer households can...