Search Results
Working Paper
The Effects of the Great Migration on Urban Renewal
The Great Migration significantly increased the number of African Americans moving to northern and western cities beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that their arrival shaped “slum clearance” and urban redevelopment efforts in receiving cities. To estimate the effect of migrants, we instrument for Black population changes using a shift-share instrument that interacts historical migration patterns with local economic shocks that predict Black out-migration from the South. We find that local governments responded by undertaking more urban renewal projects that ...
Journal Article
The impact of foreclosures on the housing market
A record number of mortgage loans are either in default or in danger of being defaulted upon. Many of the properties that back these loans will end up going through the foreclosure process. A growing body of research shows that foreclosed homes sell at a discount and that foreclosures have a negative impact on the value of other homes that are nearby. The effect on nearby property values happens for two different reasons, but my recent work suggests that one or the other predominates depending on certain characteristics of the neighborhood where the foreclosures are occurring. This finding ...
Monograph
Applying Research to Policy Issues in Distressed Housing Markets: Data-Driven Decision Making
A compilation of research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland on housing markets experiencing foreclosure and/or a large number of vacant properties which sheds light on a wide range of housing markets. It provides possible policy solutions applicable to both regional and national policy discussions.
Journal Article
Urban decline in rust-belt cities
Many Rust-Belt cities have seen almost half their populations move from inside the city borders to the surrounding suburbs and elsewhere since the 1970s. As populations shifted, neighborhoods changed?in their average income, educational profile, and housing prices. But the shift did not happen in every neighborhood at the same rate. Recent research has uncovered some of the patterns characterizing the process.>
Working Paper
The Effects of the Great Migration on Urban Renewal
The Great Migration significantly increased the number of African Americans moving to northern and western cities beginning in the first half of the twentieth century. We show that their arrival shaped slum clearance and urban redevelopment efforts in receiving cities. To estimate the effect of migrants, we instrument for Black population changes using a shift-share instrument that interacts historical migration patterns with local economic shocks that predict Black out-migration from the South. We find that local governments responded by undertaking more urban renewal projects that aimed to ...
Working Paper
The long-term employment impacts of gentrification in the 1990s
In the ongoing debate over the social benefi ts and costs of gentrification, one of the key questions left largely unaddressed by the empirical literature is the degree to which gentrification impacts local labor markets. This paper begins by exploring the nature of employment change in one archetypical gentrifying neighborhood?Chicago?s Wicker Park?to motivate the central hypothesis that gentrification is associated with industrial restructuring. Next, a detailed analysis is presented on the long-term employment changes in neighborhoods that have experienced gentrification during the 1990s ...
Working Paper
Measuring Interest Rate Risk in the Life Insurance Sector: The U.S. and the U.K.
We use a two factor model of life insurer stock returns to measure interest rate risk at U.S. and U.K. insurers. Our estimates show that interest rate risk among U.S. life insurers increased as interest rates decreased to historically low levels in recent years. For life insurers in the U.K., in contrast, interest rate risk remained low during this time, roughly unchanged from what it was in the period prior to the financial crisis when long-term interest rates were in their usual historical ranges. We attribute these differences to the heavier use of products that combine guarantees with ...
Newsletter
How Common Was Blockbusting in the Postwar U.S.?
This article documents the prevalence of blockbusting—the orchestration of racial turnover in urban neighborhoods—throughout many major U.S. cities from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Working Paper
The Relationship Between Race, Type of Work, and Covid-19 Infection Rates
This paper explores the relationship between Covid-19 infection rates, race, and type of work. We focus on three U.S. cities—Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia—allowing us to exploit zip code-level variation in infection rates and testing rates over time, while controlling for a variety of neighborhood demographic characteristics. We find that neighborhoods with higher Black and Hispanic population shares, and neighborhoods with higher shares of workers in high-social contact jobs within essential businesses, had disproportionately higher Covid-19 infection rates, even after applying our ...
Working Paper
Credit When You Need It
We estimate the causal effect of emergency credit on households’ finances after a negative shock. To do so, we link application data from the U.S. Federal Disaster Loan program, which provides loans to households that have uninsured damages from a federally-declared natural disaster, to a panel of credit records before and after the shock. We exploit a discontinuity in the loan approval rules that led applicants with debt-to-income ratios below 40% to be differentially likely to be approved. Using an instrumented difference-in-differences research design, we find that credit provision at ...