Faculty in media

Professor Steve Ross talks about School Quality and Housing Prices

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ross[1]The National Real Estate Forum recently interviewed Professor Ross on his work on the relationship between housing prices and school quality.  This interview has been produced as a podcast at:

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In this work, Professor Ross discusses the surprising findings that school quality has only a quite modest effect on property values, and that much of the early work on this question confounded the effects of neighborhood quality with the effects of school quality.  He also discusses the contradiction between these findings and evidence that school choice actually has substantial effects on school quality, suggesting that the reason for the large effects is because school choice affects where people live and so change neighborhood quality, which as noted has large effects on housing prices.

Prof. Ross’s work with Pat Bayer and Fernando Ferreira featured in the Atlantic and the Pacific Standard

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rossProfessor Ross’s work with Pat Bayer and Fernando Ferreira has been featured in The Atlantic and the Pacific Standard

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/blacks-hispanics-mortgages/471024/

https://psmag.com/predatory-lending-is-another-form-of-american-housing-discrimination

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage lending in seven diverse metropolitan areas from 2004-2007. Even after controlling for credit score and other key risk factors, African-American and Hispanic home buyers are 105 and 78 percent more likely to have high cost mortgages for home purchases.

The increased incidence of high cost mortgages is attributable both to sorting across lenders (60-65 percent) and to differential treatment of equally qualified borrowers by lenders (35-40 percent). The vast majority of the racial and ethnic differences across lenders can be explained by a single measure of the lender’s foreclosure risk, and most of the within-lender differences are concentrated at high-risk lenders.

Thus, differential exposure to high-risk lenders combined with the differential treatment by these lenders explains almost all of the racial and ethnic differences in high cost mortgage borrowing.

Professor Ross’s Research Featured in Washington Post Blog

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rossProfessor Ross’s research has been featured in a Washington Post blog post: “How segregated schools turn kids into criminals“.

The research, with coauthors Dave Deming and Steve Billings, examines youth crime in Charlotte, NC, and finds that having more kids of similar age, gender and race nearby raises the likelihood of arrest, but only if those kids attend the same school.  Further, these kids are more likely to be arrested together as criminal partners if they live very nearby and attend the same school.

These effects are largest when these youth have been in the same neighborhood for a longer time and if they attended the same elementary school. These findings suggest that neighborhood spillovers in criminal activity are likely caused by social interactions that arise within schools, and that school level interventions may be effective in mitigating neighborhood level clusters of crime.

 

Professor Prakash’s Recent Publications

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Pprakashrofessor Nishith Prakash’s work has been featured recently in several publications.

An article that he co-authored with Marc Rockmore and Yogesh Uppal on The Economic Consequences of Accused Politicians in India has been published in the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s policy portal, Vox.

His work with co-author Sanjeev Kumar on the possible unintended consequences of an alcohol ban meant to stem violence against women has been published in several locations, including The Times of India

Blanket alcohol ban in Bihar won’t stop violence against women

and has been picked up by the Huffington Post.

Professor Hallwood Quoted in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science

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hallwoodProfessor Paul Hallwood is quoted in a paper in the current issue of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science (Vol. 10, 2) b by Harvard and Princeton co- authors on the hot topic of inter-Arab state political relationships.

Professor Hallwood was for several years an economic advisor working in the London Embassy of the Saudi Arabian government.

Prof. Ross’s research mentioned in Slate Magazine

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rossAn article on the American Melting Pot in Slate Magazine on October 31st discusses one of Professor Ross‘s recent working papers.  In this paper, Professors Ananat, Fu and Ross find that African-Americans benefit less in terms of earnings for working in locations with lots of economic activity.  Exposure to economic activity allows workers and firms to learn from each other and raises productivity and thus wages.  However, these spillovers appear to accrue along racial lines so that African-Americans do not benefit from a vibrant work location when most of the individuals working in that location are white.