Research

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, economic self-sufficiency, and criminal justice involvement. Renters moved out of revitalized areas to avoid higher rents, meaning their children grew up in similar neighborhoods as 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, consistent with increased policing in gentrified areas. The reform improved incumbent well-being on average, but large losses for renters mean that Pareto-improving transfers are likely infeasible. These findings highlight the trade-offs faced by policymakers aiming to revitalize urban neighborhoods.

It is claimed that Democratic college professors cause their students to become more liberal. In this paper, we study whether there is scope for professors to do so. We link voter registration data to salary records from 33 state flagship universities to document the partisanship of college faculty and use transcript data from one flagship university to study the causal effect of instructors on student partisanship. College faculty are more likely to identify as Democrats than the country as a whole, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Students are mostly liberals when they enter college, become more liberal regardless of their major, and sort to courses where instructors share their political ideology. Exploiting plausibly random variation in when instructors teach a given course, we do not find a relationship between faculty partisanship and changes in student partisanship, and are able to rule out even small liberalizing effects, including when we restrict to courses in the humanities and social sciences. To understand these results, we study variation in the frequency of left-leaning course topics. Liberal-oriented topics are not featured at higher rates when departments have more Democrats or when Democratic instructors teach a given course, meaning student sorting leaves little room for indoctrination.

In this paper we examine how peers' socio-economic backgrounds affect the educational outcomes, experiences, and human capital investment decisions of low-income college students. Using random assignment of first-year roommates and administrative student records, we find that low-income first-year students randomly paired with very high-income roommates perform worse in terms of GPA than low-income students randomly paired with other types of roommates, even after two years in college. To understand more about these patterns, we developed and piloted a survey of first-year undergraduate students. We find that low-income students spend relatively little time with their randomly assigned high-income roommates and are less likely to report that the roommate has helped them socially, academically, or with their career goals. Going forward, we are expanding the survey to further investigate mechanisms.