Dear Applied Statistics Workshop Community,

Our next meeting of the semester will be at 12:10 pm (EST) Wednesday, September 29, where Cory McCartan (Harvard University) presents "Measuring and Modeling Neighborhoods." This is joint work with Jacob Brown (Harvard University) and Kosuke Imai (Harvard University).

Abstract
More granular geographical data has allowed social scientists to probe how residential neighborhoods are formed and how they influence attitudes and behavior. To facilitate such studies, we develop a survey tool that allows respondents to draw their neighborhoods on a map. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model that can be used to analyze which factors shape their neighborhoods. We have conducted a survey of registered voters in Miami, New York City, and Phoenix, and find that across these cities, voters are more likely to include same-race and co-partisan census blocks into their neighborhoods. We also show that our model provides more accurate out-of-sample predictions than the standard distance-based measures of neighborhoods.