Over the past 30 years, economic distress in suburban neighborhoods has become more pronounced. This dissertation, which consists of three self-contained essays, examines how three types of mobility--residential, economic, and transportation--have contributed to the growing number of low-income households living in suburban communities. In the first essay, I assess the degree to which residential mobility has affected the income dynamics of metropolitan areas in the U.S. I find that poorer residents suburbanized rapidly between 1999 and 2015, leaving central-city neighborhoods for outlying areas at high rates. However, during the same time period, higher-income households also made urban-to-suburban moves in large numbers, meaning that the overall effect of population flows on suburban low-income rates was relatively modest. Results also show that low-income households that relocated from central-city neighborhoods to suburban communities were different from those that remained in urban neighborhoods. Specifically, urban-to-suburban movers were more likely to be white, had more household resources, and lived in origin neighborhoods with lower population densities and less transit supply than those that made intra-urban relocations. The second essay addresses the influence of economic mobility on the low-income rates of both urban and suburban geographies. The results indicate that in most suburban and urban neighborhood types, more residents transitioned out of low-income status than fell below the low-income threshold. Consequently, economic mobility generally led to aggregate decreases in the percentage of low-income individuals in a given type of neighborhood. At the household level, however, income volatility was more pronounced, and families living in older, moderately dense residential neighborhoods had a relatively high likelihood of experiencing downward economic mobility. Finally, the third essay investigates how low-income households adapt their transportation mobility to fit new residential contexts. In particular, I examine the relationship between inter-geography relocations and changes in automobile ownership. Findings demonstrate that poorer families adjusted their vehicle ownership to suit the built-environment characteristics of their destination neighborhoods. For example, carless households that made urban-to-suburban moves had a higher likelihood of acquiring a vehicle, ceteris paribus; by contrast, car-owning families that made suburban-to-urban moves had a relatively high probability of reducing their automobile ownership, and were more likely to become carless than households that moved within the suburbs.

Seventeen papers by academics, evaluation researchers, and policy-makers deal with the importance of mobility research -- the study of ways in which neighbourhoods change -- for policy implementation, formulation, and research. Empirical mobility research, models for policy evaluation derived from it, the kinds of research needed to help local government keep abreast of changes in the areas they administer are some of the major topics discussed. '...this is a useful collection of essays which is well drawn together by the editors. The book should be essential reading for all academics interested in mobility research.' -- Progress in Human Geography, September 1984

The study of intergenerational mobility has a long history in the social sciences. Previous studies have proposed various mobility concepts, striven to overcome empirical barriers to achieve accurate national measures, and mapped out cross-country patterns and time trends of mobility. The three essays in dissertation contribute to a recent strand of this literature which seeks to understand the mechanisms through which social status is transmitted across generations. After an overall introduction in chapter one, chapter two uses recently published county-level data to study the determinants of intergenerational mobility, measured by income levels and teen birth rates. Following Solons mobility model, we study the impacts of public investment in human capital, returns to human capital, and taxation. The results show that better school quality and higher returns to education increase adult incomes and reduce teen birth rates for children from low income families. By comparing counties within or adjacent to metropolitan areas to other counties, this study finds that urban upward mobility is sensitive to parents' education while non-urban upward mobility is sensitive to migration opportunities.Chapter three employs court-ordered School Finance Reforms (SFRs) as quasi-experiments to quantify the effects of education equity on intergenerational mobility within commuting zones. First, I use reduced form difference-in-difference analysis to show that 10 years of exposure to SFRs increases the average college attendance rate by about 5.2% for children with the lowest parent income. The effect of exposure to SFRs decreases with parent income and increases with the duration of exposure. Second, to directly model the causal pathways, I construct a measure for education inequity based on the association between school district education expenditure and median family income. Using exposure to SFRs as the instrumental variable, 2SLS analysis suggests that one standard deviation reduction in education inequality will cause the average college attendance rate to increase by 2.2% for children at the lower end of the parent income spectrum. Placing the magnitudes of these effects in context, I conclude that policies aimed at increasing education equity, such as SFRs, can substantially benefit poor children but they alone are not enough to overcome the high degree of existing inequalities.Chapter four studies the Intergenerational Persistence of Self-employment in China across the Planned Economy Era. It finds that children whose parents were self-employed before Chinas socialist transformation were more likely to become self-employed themselves after the economic reform even though they had no direct exposure to their parents businesses. The effect is found in both urban and rural areas, but only for sons. Furthermore, asset holding data indicate that households with self-employed parents before the socialist transformation were more risk tolerant. These findings suggest that the taste for self-employment is an important conduit of parents effects on self-employment, and that the taste being transferred can be mapped to known entrepreneurial attitudes.

This dissertation analyses how the geographical sorting of individuals and households affects labour markets as well as gender and spatial inequality. In the first chapter, I show that labour force participation increases with city size for all demographic groups except for women with children, for whom it decreases, a phenomenon that I label Big City Child Penalty (BCCP). Both by means of empirical evidence and a quantitative spatial model of households, I show that the BCCP can be explained by commuting times, wages, and childcare price differentials between small and big cities as well as for unobserved heterogeneity in preferences for a stay-home parent. The second chapter of this dissertation highlights the role of delayed childbearing as an important driver of gentrification. While downtowns provide shorter commuting times and more consumption amenities, limited housing space and schools' worse quality reduce the value of this location choice when children are born. We exploit exogenous variation in the cost of postponing childbearing to obtain causal estimates of the impact of delayed maternity on gentrification. We find that enhanced access to assisted reproductive technologies in the state increases income downtown by 5.4% relative to the suburbs. The third chapter studies the relationship between trade and migration. Coinciding with a period of increasing trade integration, the educational composition of migrants within the European Union changed towards high-skilled workers. We build a two-country, two-sector general equilibrium model in which countries only differ in the productivity of high-tech workers. While price equalization, induced by trade integration, equalizes the real wages of non-educated workers, differences in the real wages of educated workers remain, since the latter are more productive in the most advanced country. As a consequence, factor mobility is needed to exhaust differences in real wages, leading to high-skilled emigration towards the most advanced country.

"This dissertation contributes to two literatures: Urban Economics and Labor Economics. In the first chapter I estimate the effect of home ownership on individual workers' unemployment and wage growth, as well as other labor market outcomes. Because of higher moving costs, home owners will be less willing than renters to relocate for work and could therefore face longer unemployment spells. To elaborate on this hypothesis, credited to Oswald (1996), I build a simple search model and obtain a set of labor market predictions to test. The current microeconomic literature has reached mixed results regarding home ownership's impact, with most studies concluding that home ownership reduces unemployment. I show that the instruments used are likely to be invalid because of, among other reasons, Tiebout (1956) type sorting into housing markets. I use an instrumental variable free of the endogeneity present in other work: the county level home ownership rate when and where the worker grew up. This IV affects workers' preferences for housing but not, conditional on my covariates, their labor market ability. My results indicate that home ownership is a significant hindrance to mobility, and homeowners suffer longer unemployment spells and slower wage growth because of it. In the second chapter I use a dynamic model of neighborhood choice to estimate household preferences over the demographic characteristics of a neighborhood. I focus on the racial mix, average income and housing price level of a neighborhood, and whether households prefer neighbors that are similar to themselves. Identification of these preferences is complicated by the social aspect of neighborhood amenities. A household's valuation of a particular choice (neighborhood) is a function of the choices other households in the market have made and will make in the future. I show that demographic characteristics of a neighborhood are therefore endogenous to neighborhood quality. Standard estimates of preferences over neighbors may be biased by the presence of such unobservable local amenities. I develop a framework to correct this problem based on a careful delineation of the information households could have access to before and after they make their decisions. The model I build has the advantage over the literature of being able to produce self-consistent predictions about demographic changes. I deal with the low frequency of observations in my data set, the decennial census, by simulating local housing markets between data collection periods. After controlling for type-specific preferences for the physical amenities of neighborhoods, I find a universal preference for higher income neighbors. In contrast to much of the literature, my results suggest white households have no aversion to minority neighbors. In the third chapter I estimate the effect of parental credit scores on the child's probability of attending and completing college. Parents in the US are increasingly supplementing the student loans available to their children with unsecured debt in their own name. This is the first paper on this topic to make use of direct observations of credit scores, rather than rely on proxies such as wealth shocks. I find that good parental credit significantly improves the child's probability of attending college, with a smaller (although still significant) effect on the probability of completing a four-year degree. I provide evidence that the estimated relationship is causal and not biased by, for example, unobserved ability. Additionally, I show that credit scores may affect attendance through channels other than access to the student loan market. I hypothesize households substitute the potential to borrow for precautionary savings"--Pages iii-iv.