NYU Furman Center Fall Speaker Series: Evan Mast

Please join the NYU Furman Center for a virtual lunchtime presentation:

Income Dynamics, Migration, and Neighborhood Composition
with
Evan Mast
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Notre Dame

Wednesday, 10/26 @ 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. ET
Join on Zoom

Mast and his co-authors study how the income dynamics and migration decisions of individuals determine the composition of neighborhoods, using new data that links the near-universe of longitudinal individual residential locations to Census Bureau survey responses. First, they illustrate that neighborhoods are not static: individuals frequently move across different types of neighborhoods, and substantial individual income dynamics occur in all types of neighborhoods. However, because migration is selective---people with good income realizations tend to move to higher-income neighborhoods and vice versa---this churn reinforces compositional differences between neighborhoods rather than reducing them. Second, they benchmark the quantitative importance of these dynamics by calibrating a simple model using the microdata. Simulations show that selective migration significantly moderates the effect of improving the individual income process in high-poverty neighborhoods, shrinking the decrease in the neighborhood poverty rate by about 25%. Selective migration similarly has a large effect on how existing individual income dynamics pass through to neighborhood composition: high-poverty neighborhoods could see major improvements from increased retention of middle-income individuals.

About the Presenter: 

Evan Mast is an applied microeconomist specializing in urban economics and public finance. His main research interests are housing markets and place-based policies. His work has been published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Regional Science and Urban Economics.

This event is open to members of the NYU community. Please register using this RSVP link.