Publications
Trends and Patterns in Intergenerational Mobility in Education (with Jason Fletcher). Journal of Human Capital. 2020.
High Schools and Educational Mobility (with Jason Fletcher). Review of Social Stratification and Mobility. 2021.
Parental Involvement and Neighborhood Quality: Evidence from Public Housing Demolitions in Chicago. Review of Economics of the Household. 2022.
Work in Progress
The Lasting Impact of Historical Residential Security Maps on Experienced Segregation (with Daniel Aaronson, Daniel Hartley and Bhashkar Mazumder). Under review. [abstract]
Gasoline Prices and Income Disparities in Daily Travel Patterns (with Noli Brazil). [abstract]
The Lasting Impact of Historical Residential Security Maps on Experienced Segregation
We study the impact of the 1930s HOLC residential security maps on experienced segregation based on cell phone records which track visits out of and into home neighborhoods. We compare adjacent neighborhoods, one of which was assigned a lower grade for creditworthiness than the other. We use a sample of neighborhood borders which, based on estimated propensity scores, are likely to have been drawn for idiosyncratic reasons. Neighborhoods on the lower graded side of the border are associated with more visits to other historically lower graded destination neighborhoods. Today, these destination neighborhoods tend to have lower household income and, in some cases, lower educational attainment. We find that these disparities in visits are not driven by work commutes, very local visits, or differences in income. We also find similar disparities for incoming visits. Finally, we study the impact of the maps on non-residential segregation at the city level, based on a comparison of cities around a population cutoff that determined whether a city was included in the HOLC program. Using transition matrices, we describe visit probabilities across the distribution of home and destination neighborhood incomes. In cities with HOLC maps, visits across neighborhood income lines are less common, but this effect is less pronounced for the richest home neighborhoods. These findings suggest that these historical "redlining" maps affect non-residential segregation and the social interactions of urban residents in the present day.
Gasoline Prices and Income Disparities in Daily Travel Patterns
We study the impact of gas price fluctuations on daily travel patterns, for 10 major cities in the U.S. Our focus is on differential impacts by neighborhood income. We merge gas price data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration with cellphone traffic data from Safegraph, for the period from March 2018 to May 2021. Our descriptive regressions reveal opposite patterns before vs. during the COVID pandemic. During the pre-pandemic period, high gas prices are associated with reductions in the outgoing visit frequency gap between high-income and low-income neighborhoods. During the peak pandemic period, this pattern reverses. After accounting for changes in mean distance to destinations, we find similar results for a measure of mileage. We supplement these findings with an analysis of the short-run impact of changes to state gas tax rates, which affected three cities in our sample. We find increases in gas tax rate consistently widen the neighborhood income gap in mean distance, with ambiguous effects on the visit frequency gap. We discuss potential explanations for these discrepancies.