Researchers and educators often argue that a student's peers strongly influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools in a community will leave many students doubly disadvantaged and amplify existing inequalities....

The influence of peer behavior on an individual's choices has received renewed interest in recent years. However, accurate measures of this influence are difficult to obtain. Standard reduced-form methods lead to upwardly biased estimates due to simultaneity, common shocks, and nonrandom peer...

This paper finds that the predicted unemployment rate in a community increases dramatically when the fraction of neighborhood residents with college degrees drops below twenty percent. This threshold behavior provides empirical support for "epidemic" theories of inner-city unemployment. Using a...

A number of studies have indicated that peer smoking is a highly influential factor in a young person's decision to smoke. However, these results are suspect because the studies often fail to account for selection and simultaneity bias. This paper develops an econometric model of youth smoking...

Traditionally, econometric research on social interaction effects has used fairly large social groups (schools, Census tracts, etc.). However, new data which describes the behavior of much smaller peer groups is becoming available. This paper analyzes the behavior of "small neighborhoods" in the...