Residential neighborhood effects

This paper reports an empirical investigation of housing maintenance decisions which allows for social interactions within small residential neighborhoods with data from the American Housing Survey for 1985 and 1989. The study explores a neglected feature of the data, namely the availability of data of neighborhood clusters for metropolitan areas in the United States, with neighborhoods consisting of a dwelling unit and its 10 nearest neighbors. The paper identifies an important, and statistically very significant, effect of social interactions, while individual and dwelling unit characteristics are accounted for. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.