Off the Beaten Tract: Constructing a New Neighborhood Geography Using Revealed Preference

Alaina Barca and Evan Mast
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Alaina Barca: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/our-people/alaina-barca
Evan Mast: https://www.upjohn.org/about/upjohn-team/staff/evan-mast

No 26-16, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: We construct a new neighborhood geography using a revealed preference intuition: If people disproportionately move within neighborhoods, their boundaries can be backed out from migration flows. Our “districts,” which consist of about nine census tracts each, correspond to recognizable local areas, as their boundaries align with physical barriers, sharp demographic changes, and local government borders. To illustrate applications, we first show that tract-level analyses of neighborhood sorting miss important broader patterns. Second, aggregating tract-level intergenerational mobility estimates to the district level increases precision threefold while introducing little aggregation bias, resulting in improved predictive power in a hold-out sample.

Keywords: Neighborhood definition; residential mobility; residential sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67
Date: 2026-03-24
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DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2026.16

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