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.
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Find related papers by JEL classification: R23 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Social Norms and Social Capital; Social Networks Economic Anthropology
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Durlauf, Steven N., 2004.
"Neighborhood effects,"
Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics,
in: J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 50, pages 2173-2242
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Alexandre Mas & Enrico Moretti, 2006.
"Peers at Work,"
NBER Working Papers
12508, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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