Searching for the Best Neighborhood: Mobility and Social Interactions

Yannis Ioannides and Giulio Zanella

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: The paper seeks to contribute to the social interactions literature by exploiting data on individuals’ self-selection into neighborhoods. We study a model in which households search for the best location in the presence of neighborhood effects in the formation of children’s human capital and in the process of cultural transmission. We use micro data from the PSID which we have merged, using geocodes, with contextual information at the levels of census tracts and of counties from the 2000 US Census. We control for numerous individual characteristics and neighborhood attributes and find, consistently with neighbourhood effects models, that households with children, but not those without, are more likely to move out of neighborhoods whose attributes are not favorable to the production of human capital and the transmission of parents’ cultural traits, and to move into neighborhoods which instead exhibit desirable such attributes.

JEL-codes: R23 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-mig, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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http://repec.deps.unisi.it/quaderni/533.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Searching for the Best Neighborhood: Mobility and Social Interactions (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usi:wpaper:533

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