Boundaries Generate Discontinuities in the Urban Landscape

Vikram Maheshri and Kenneth Whaley

No 2024-04, Working Papers from University of South Florida, Department of Economics

Abstract: Neighborhood boundaries are often determined by physical topography, transportation networks, or the administration of public goods (e.g., school attendance zones). We present a simple model of boundaries that predicts discontinuities in household demographics, the supply of amenities, and home prices at physical and administrative boundaries. We take these predictions to the data and find abundant evidence of discontinuities in a wide range of observable dimensions – the universe of variables available in the 2020 Census at the Block group level – and six different types of boundaries. We draw two important conclusions from these findings: (1) researchers should implement boundary discontinuity designs with caution because the key identification assumption may not hold except in narrow applications, and (2) even narrowly targeted place-based policies may have much broader impacts if they involve a new administrative boundary.

Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.usf.edu/arts-sciences/departments/econ ... s/wpaper/2024-04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usf:wpaper:2024-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of South Florida, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Diogo Baerlocher ().