A large literature documents the economic benefits of moving children to low-poverty neighborhoods. However, it is not clear if children will benefit when their current neighborhood improves around them, especially for households paying market rents. I study how neighborhood revitalization affects incumbent children, focusing on a 1998 Houston housing reform that incentivized building single-family homes downtown. The reform increased median household incomes by ten percent and rents by seven percent as affluent, college-educated households moved into these homes. Using administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I examine impacts on children’s long-run human capital attainment and economic self-sufficiency. Renter households moved out of revitalized areas, meaning their children grew up in similar neighborhoods to untreated individuals. In contrast, homeowner children lived in better neighborhoods and parent home equity increased. Young renter children had worse labor market outcomes, suggestive of disruption costs, while owner children attained more education and economic self-sufficiency. Owner children were also charged with crimes at higher rates, potentially due to increased policing in gentrified areas. The reform improved incumbent well-being on average, but large losses for renters mean that Pareto-improving transfers are practically challenging. These findings highlight the trade-offs faced by policymakers aiming to revitalize urban neighborhoods.

We study whether Democratic college professors make their students more liberal. We link voter data to salary records from 33 state flagships and show that faculty skew Democratic, especially in the humanities and social sciences. We then use student transcripts from one flagship to estimate causal effects. Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach courses, we find no effect of faculty partisanship on student partisanship. Text analysis shows exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.

Involvement with the child welfare system varies dramatically across places. While some of this variation may reflect differences in underlying maltreatment risk, it may also result from differences in institutional responses to similar circumstances. To disentangle these explanations, we study Michigan public school data linked to Child Protective Services reports from 2017–2024. School-level reporting rates range from virtually none to more than half of students reported between kindergarten and fifth grade. We estimate school-specific reporting tendencies using value-added methods and document substantial variation in reporting behavior after accounting for differences in student risk. Using student movers, we show that these estimates are forecast- unbiased. Our estimates imply that school-specific reporting practices account for roughly 40 percent of the variation in reporting rates across schools. We then estimate a structural model that decomposes reporting practices into diagnostic skill and preferences. Differences in skill explain more than twice as much variation as differences in preferences, and higher-reporting schools tend to be more skilled at identifying high-risk cases. Counterfactual simulations imply that improving detection skill would yield significant welfare gains, while recent policy proposals aimed at reducing or equalizing reporting rates generally lower welfare by increasing the number of high- risk cases that go unreported.