Do neighborhoods have boundaries? A novel empirical test for a historic question.

Do neighborhoods have boundaries? Scholars have debated how neighborhoods should be operationalized for decades. While recent scholarship has de-emphasized boundaries, I argue that boundaries are focal to understanding what neighborhoods are and why they are so segregated. Relying on everyday mobility patterns data from a panel of 45 million nationally representative devices, I demonstrate that divisions between contiguous census block groups in terms of everyday mobility patterns align with divisions in race, educational attainment, occupation, and age.

Increased homicide played a key role in driving Black-White disparities in life expectancy among men during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disparities in life expectancy between Black and White Americans increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the same period, the US experienced the largest increase in homicide on record. Yet, little research has examined the contribution of homicide to Black-White disparities in longevity in recent years.

Neighborhood Racial Composition and Unequal Exposure to Violent Crime in Everyday Contexts.

Exposure to violence is a critical aspect of contemporary racial inequality in the United States. While extensive research has examined variations in violent crime rates across neighborhoods, less attention has been given to understanding individuals' everyday exposure to violent crimes. This study investigates patterns of exposure to violent crimes among neighborhood residents using cell phone mobility data and violent crime reports from Chicago.

Assessing interstate racial and socioeconomic disparities in newborn screening policies in the United States.

Introduction: This paper explores racial and socioeconomic disparities in newborn screening (NBS) policies across the United States. While inter-state inequality in healthcare policies is often considered a meaningful source of systemic inequity in healthcare outcomes, to the best of our knowledge, no research has explored racial and socioeconomic disparities in newborn screening policies based on state of residence.

Methods: We investigate these disparities by calculating weighted average exposure to specific NBS tests by racial and socioeconomic group.

Cold weather isolation is worse in poor and non-white neighborhoods in the United States.

Social isolation can cause a variety of adverse physical and mental health effects and is central to understanding broader social disparities among marginalized groups in the United States. This study aims to assess whether temperature variation is associated with daily social isolation at the neighborhood level. I test a series of two-way fixed effects models to see if mean daily temperature is associated with individuals spending the entire day at home, as measured using smartphone data, across a sample of 45 million devices in 2019 in the United States.

Inter-City Emotional Synchrony Is Conditional on Mobility Patterns.

Recent research has attempted to document large-scale emotional contagion on online social networks. Despite emotional contagion being primarily driven by in-person mechanisms, less research has attempted to measure large-scale emotional contagion in in-person contexts. In this paper, I operationalize the temporal emotions associated with a particular city at particular points in time using sentiment analysis on Twitter data.

Neighborhood socioeconomic inequality based on everyday mobility predicts COVID-19 infection in San Francisco, Seattle, and Wisconsin.

Race and class disparities in COVID-19 cases are well documented, but pathways of possible transmission by neighborhood inequality are not. This study uses administrative data on COVID-19 cases for roughly 2000 census tracts in Wisconsin, Seattle/King County, and San Francisco to analyze how neighborhood socioeconomic (dis)advantage predicts cumulative caseloads through February 2021. Unlike past research, we measure a neighborhood's disadvantage level using both its residents' demographics and the demographics of neighborhoods its residents visit and are visited by, leveraging daily mobility data from 45 million mobile devices.

Property Tax Foreclosure, Spatial Effects, and Neighborhood Racial Demographic Change: Examining Data From Detroit.

In recent decades, the city of Detroit has experienced the greatest population loss of any major American city. Applying Event History Analysis methodology to a large dataset containing information on all properties in Detroit between 2002 and 2013, I examine how Property Tax Foreclosure spatially perpetuated itself in Detroit, finding evidence that the number of past but recent Property Tax Foreclosures in a localized area significantly predicts the likelihood of a future foreclosure. I extrapolate these findings to mathematical simulations and find evidence that suggests that initial Property Tax Foreclosures played a significant role in cascading many later on.