The importance of neighborhood ties: Relocation decisions after the Chicago fire of 1871

My paper uses the Chicago fire of 1871 as a natural experiment to study the factors underlying neighborhood ties, by examining the decision to move back after the fire. My data include a random sample of 20,000 individuals in Chicago from the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Censuses. I follow over 300 families and explore their relocation decisions. I find that homeownership, multiple children, and living near others who are ethnically similar increase the likelihood of remaining in a neighborhood. This latter finding points to the role of community support for recently arrived immigrants. I also find that it is a family's relative wealth, and not absolute wealth, that plays a key role in its social capital. Families who are richer than the average family in their neighborhood tend to move, which suggests that richer families' social capital is not neighborhood-specific.