Climbing Mount Laurel, authored by a group of sociologists led by Douglas S. Massey, is about the efforts by Mount Laurel Township, NJ, residents to have affordable housing built in their community. From when it was first proposed in 1969 and until the first units were completed in 2000, the project faced extraordinary political opposition, caused a number of landmark court decisions, and motivated affordable-housing legislation by other US states. This review evaluates, from an economics perspective, the lessons learned, as argued by Massey et al., about the impact of affordable housing within the host community and on surrounding communities.

This assessment of Scott Page's The Difference (Princeton University Press, 2007) emphasizes the depth and breadth of the book's coverage and arguments and checks them against existing empirical evidence, when available. It argues that the book navigates artfully between being a “manifesto” for diversity and rigorous science writing while at the same time marketing economic science in new ways. The review welcomes the book's popularization of richer aspects of everyday decision making, individual and collective, and its making an excellent case for the social significance of abstract economic theorizing, especially about problem solving. It praises the book's lively interpretations of statistical tools of decision making by means of enticing narratives. The book's rhetoric urges us to move beyond accepting diversity as a matter of taste, or even because of its beneficial effects on the “production function,” and ultimately adopts its powerful logic. It speculates that the book's true impact will likely come after thorough empirical research. In empirical endeavors, issues of definition, especially of identity and of measurement, and evaluation of policies that would enhance diversity would be decisive. In democratic societies, policies may pose new dilemmas as they benefit from public interest in overcoming the accumulation of past disadvantages.

We develop a simple behavioral model of intergenerational transfers, with individuals being subject to uncertainty about their children's incomes. Individuals differ with respect to innate ability and to wealth transfers they receive at birth. The distributions of total wealth, of total income, and of their components are uniquely determined from the equilibrium distribution of intergenerational transfers, for which existence and uniqueness are proven. For a particular utility function and provided that earned income follows a stable law, we show that so do all endogenous distributions. Intergenerational transfers are relatively more equally distributed than earnings, capital income, and lifetime wealth.

We approach the literature on housing and inequality from two angles. One is the impact of unequal endowments on housing. The second is the “memberships” inequality associated with neighborhoods, namely, households’ location in a geographic and social context. We elaborate on these two angles of inequality and focus on three distinctive features of housing: consumption, capital, and location. For owner-occupants, capital and consumption are bundled together in a single good. For both renters and owner-occupants, housing consumption inequality, access to good neighborhoods, and housing wealth follow from unequal endowments. Housing can propagate inequality by enabling owner-occupants to use it as collateral for other investments or to secure higher returns to human capital investments through the better schools in better neighborhoods. We use this approach to analyze key aspects of housing and inequality, paying special attention to the impacts of racial discrimination and segregation.

This paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends, relatives, and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market. It also addresses the role of network structure and size, the resource endowments of contacts, and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks. In doing so, the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties, inbreeding, distance from structural holes, etc. The paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks, that is where individuals obtain job-related information through a given social structure, and endogenous job information networks, which are social networks that result from individuals' uncoordinated actions. The paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature. Finally, the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks, where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies, with the dynamics of human capital formation, which include the joint effects of parental, community and neighborhood human capital, and are set in life cycle frequencies, for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality.

We consider the relation between wages and productivity by means of a model based on the following assumptions. Workers live for 2 periods, firms live forever, senior workers differ nontrivially from junior, seniority enhances workers' expected second-period earnings, both firms and workers recognize the prospect of promotion and the senior-junior wage differential at the time of hiring, and firms have monopsony power in hiring junior workers. We show that senior wages are equal to the senior marginal product, but junior wages are set below the junior marginal product by an amount that depends on the elasticity of the firm's labor supply.

This paper is concerned with the theory of implicit labor contracts. The implications of introducing hours worked or effort as an argument both in workers' utility functions (in addition to the wage rate) and in firms' production functions (in addition to the number of workers) are considered. It is shown that layoffs can occur at equilibrium in the absence of unemployment compensation and value of leisure, but only because of the inclusion of this additional variable.

Yannis M. Ioannides, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Estimating the Consumption and Investment Demands for Housing and Their Effect on Housing Tenure Status, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 127-141

Wages and Employment in a Random Social Network with Arbitrary Degree Distribution by Yannis M. Ioannides and Adriaan R. Soetevent. Published in volume 96, issue 2, pages 270-274 of American Economic Review, May 2006