Research Papers

We studied the emergence, persistence, and consequences of urban slums along the structural transformation and urbanization of developing countries. We construct a general equilibrium model in which the size and composition of urban slums emerge endogenously along with disparities in housing costs, labor markets, and schooling opportunities across a country’s rural and urban regions.

The macro development literature has largely ignored exploring the conditions for labor, housing, and schooling markets that give rise to large and persistent shares of a country’s population living in urban slums and has sidestepped the long-term consequences of these extreme forms of metropolitan segregation for human capital of children growing up in slums.

Many rural-to-urban migrants become slum dwellers, segregated from the city. Besides lacking basic services and enduring the dire living conditions, these migrants may be excluded from the learning opportunities offered by the formal cities. As much as 20% of the population in developing countries lives in urban slums, with multiple countries having more of their population in urban slums than in rural areas.

We developed and tested a model explaining how growing up in a poor neighborhood impedes cognitive development, focusing on early life exposure to neurotoxic air pollution. We analyzed data from a national sample of American infants, examining their exposure to over 50 pollutants known or suspected to harm the central nervous system, using causal inference methods and supervised machine learning.

We aimed to uncover the mechanisms by which neighborhood poverty affects cognitive development. By identifying specific factors, such as neurotoxic air pollution, that mediate these effects, we sought to provide insights that could inform interventions and policies aimed at mitigating the adverse impacts of growing up in impoverished neighborhoods.

Our study shows that living in a high-poverty neighborhood increases exposure to harmful air pollutants during infancy, reducing cognitive abilities at age 4 by about one-tenth of a standard deviation. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial for developing targeted interventions to improve cognitive outcomes for children in poor neighborhoods and addressing environmental health disparities.

We followed 1,266 children in Chicago from birth through school entry, tracking their risk of lead exposure and neighborhood socioeconomic composition to estimate the joint effects on receptive vocabulary ability.

We aimed to address the gap in research on the impact of disadvantaged neighborhoods on cognitive development during early childhood, as most studies focus on school-age children or adolescents.

Our findings show that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods reduces vocabulary skills in early childhood through lead contamination. Understanding this causal pathway is crucial for developing interventions to improve cognitive outcomes for children in impoverished neighborhoods and addressing environmental health disparities, promoting better long-term educational and developmental prospects.

We discussed the importance of incorporating process and context into economic models of individual choice behavior.

We aimed to improve the accuracy and realism of economic models by taking into account the dynamics of decision-making and the influence of context.

We advocate for more nuanced and context-aware models of economic behavior, acknowledging the influence of cognitive and social factors on individual choices.

We explored the concept of poverty traps with a focus on the Appalachian region, examining factors contributing to persistent poverty.

We aimed to provide a nuanced understanding of poverty traps in a specific geographic context, offering insights that could inform targeted anti-poverty policies.

We contribute to the literature on poverty traps, providing region-specific insights that can guide policymakers in designing effective interventions to break the cycle of poverty.

We investigated the effects of long-term exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduation by following 4,154 children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, measuring neighborhood context annually from age 1 to 17.

We aimed to address the gap in previous research that typically measures neighborhood context only once, failing to account for the duration of residence and understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage.

Our findings reveal that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods significantly reduces the probability of high school graduation, with impacts larger than previously reported. For black children, graduation rates drop from 96% to 76%, and for nonblack children, from 95% to 87%. These results highlight the importance of addressing long-term neighborhood disadvantage to improve educational outcomes.

We survey the modern economics literature on the role of neighborhoods in influencing socioeconomic outcomes, covering a range of theoretical, econometric, and empirical topics.

Studies argue that geographic neighborhood influences are crucial for understanding inner city poverty. Methodological advances in economic theory now incorporate spillover effects into microeconomic models, similar to those in growth contexts. Additionally, analyzing neighborhood effects in game theory has become a significant research area.

Neighborhood effects have been analyzed in a range of theoretical and applied contexts and have proven to be of interest in understanding questions ranging from the asymptotic properties of various evolutionary games to explaining the persistence of poverty in inner cities.