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

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.