Good neighbors, bad neighbors: local knowledge spillovers, regional institutions and firm performance in China

Good Markets Make Bad Neighbors

In their manuscript, Corsaro, Hunt, Kroovand Hipple, and McGarrell (2012, this issue) provide a valuable contribution to the literature regarding focused deterrence with an econometric evaluation of the High Point Drug Market Intervention (DMI). By employing a difference-in-difference Poisson panel regression framework, as well as group-based trajectory analyses, these authors examine the High ...

Bankruptcy Spillovers between Close Neighbors

We examine bankruptcy spillovers between very close neighbors. Our fine grained location data allows us to use the cross-sectional difference methodology (e.g. Grinblatt, Keloharju, Ikaheimo (2008), Campbell, Giglio, Pathak (2011)) to control for non-random neighborhood sorting and unobservable neighborhood shocks. This approach subtracts characteristics of inner-ring neighbors (14 households o...

Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village

Many years ago Elie Wiesel observed: “The mystery of goodness far exceeds the mystery of evil.” Mimi Schwartz, the American-born daughter of a refugee father from the village of Benheim (not its real name), Germany, has written an evocative memoir that explores the goodness of certain of the village’s Christians during the Holocaust. She seeks answers to two related questions: what accounted fo...

Bad Neighbors: Failed States and Their Consequences

Local neighbors as positives, regional neighbors as negatives: Competing channels in the relationship between others' income, health, and happiness.

That well-being is decreasing in others' income is termed the "relative income hypothesis" (RIH) by scholars of subjective well-being (SWB) and has substantial empirical support. Some studies, however, present evidence of both positive and negative explanatory channels in the relationship between others' income and SWB. We develop a theoretical framework integrating four distinct channels throu...