Local Spillovers, Externalities and Sorting of Households by Race and Income in Locational Equilibrium

在这个项目中，我们调查了家庭居住地点决策的决定因素和后果。特别是，我们通过收入、人口特征和偏好研究导致社区家庭分层的因素。例如，家庭可能会根据房价和当地公共产品和设施（如教育、公共安全和环境质量）的质量来选择社区。此外，邻居对收入、种族或其他人口特征的偏好也可能在家庭选址选择中发挥作用。我们还研究了个人的居住选择如何影响邻里和社区的结果。这种影响可能通过影响教育、警察和其他公共服务支出的集体（例如投票）决定来发挥作用。影响可能更直接地通过社区效应产生——个体之间的相互作用影响社区的特征和质量及其提供的服务。例如，学校内外的父母参与和同伴效应可能影响儿童的教育成就和社会发展。社区内的互动也可能影响公共安全和社区环境质量。如果家庭关心邻居的收入、种族和其他人口特征，个人的选择也可能影响其他人对邻居的满意度。因此，我们工作的一个特别重点是了解社区人口构成偏好与当地公共产品之间的相互作用，从而确定社区间按种族和其他特征划分的人口。我们还研究了溢出效应和外部性在社区内部和相邻社区之间的重要性。我们的贡献既在于新方法的发展，也在于这些方法的应用。在之前的研究中，我们和其他人已经制定了研究分层模型的策略，这些模型对社区间的家庭分类模式以及相关的房价和公共服务质量变化施加了相当大的先验结构。特别是，这些模型暗示了家庭收入、房价和公共服务质量在社区之间的共同排序。虽然这些模型提供了许多有价值的见解，并具有相当大的预测能力，但它们仍然是限制性的。特别是，它们允许个体在人口特征和偏好方面的相对有限的变化，并且，在存在多种地方公共产品的情况下，它们意味着各种产品在社区之间的共同质量排序。我们的研究通过开发模型、计算和计量经济学方法推动了最先进的技术，这些模型和方法允许考虑多个观察到的和未观察到的个人特征以及多个当地公共产品和设施。我们正在制定的框架也考虑到社区效应和跨社区的溢出效应。努力理解异质家庭对当地公共产品、环境便利设施和社区质量的空间差异的调整具有重要的政策意义。我们对家庭的分类和混合的综合分析提供了更好的理解在大都市地区观察到的种族隔离和收入分层。我们的框架还允许调查大规模变化的影响，如税收限制、学校财政平衡计划、环境质量变化和犯罪率下降。特别是，我们的方法允许调查这些变化如何影响家庭的选址决策，变化带来的收益和损失如何在家庭中分布，以及这些变化如何影响整个社区的房价分布。

In this project, we investigate the determinants and consequences of household residential location decisions. In particular, we study factors leading to stratification of households across communities by income, demographic characteristics, and preferences. For example, households may choose communities based on housing prices and the quality of local public goods and amenities such as education, public safety, and environmental quality. In addition, preferences for income, race, or other demographic characteristics of neighbors may play a role in household location choices. We also investigate how residential choices of individuals affect neighborhood and community outcomes. Such effects may operate through collective (e.g., voting) decisions that affect expenditures on education, police, and other public services. Effects may arise more directly via neighborhood effects-interactions among individuals that affect the character and quality of neighborhoods and the services they provide. For example, parental involvement and peer effects both within and outside schools may affect children's educational achievement and social development. Interactions within neighborhoods may also affect public safety and the quality of the neighborhood environment. Choices of individuals may also affect satisfaction of others with a neighborhood if households care about income, race, and other demographic characteristics of neighbors. A particular focus of our work, then, is to understand the interaction of preferences for neighborhood demographic composition and local public goods in determining the sorting of population by race and other characteristics across communities. We also investigate the importance of spillover effects and externalities within communities and across neighboring communities.Our contributions are both to development of new methods and to application of those methods. In previous research, we and others have developed strategies for studying stratification in models that impose considerable a priori structure on the patterns of household sorting across communities and associated variation in housing prices and public service quality. In particular, such models imply a common ordering across communities of household incomes, housing prices, and public service quality. While these models provide many valuable insights and have considerable predictive power, they are nonetheless restrictive. In particular, they allow for relatively limited variation across individuals in demographic characteristics and preferences, and, where multiple local public goods are present, they imply a common ordering of qualities across communities for the various goods. Our research advances the state of the art by developing models and computational and econometric methods that permit consideration of multiple observed and unobserved characteristics of individuals and multiple local public goods and amenities. The framework that we are developing also accommodates neighborhood effects and spillovers across neighborhoods. Efforts to understand the adjustments of heterogeneous households to spatial differences in local public goods, environmental amenities, and neighborhood quality have important policy implications. Our comprehensive analysis of the sorting and mixing of households provides improved understanding of racial segregation and income stratification observed in metropolitan areas. Our framework also permits investigation of the effects of large-scale changes such as tax limitations, school finance equalization programs, changes in environmental quality, and falling crime rates. In particular, our approach permits investigation of how such changes affect location decisions of households, how gains and losses arising from the changes are distributed across households, and how the changes affect the distribution of housing prices across comunities.