3.1 Data
The deciennial census provides a comprehensive set of data on demographic and economic conditions across a wide array of geographical units. One of the most disaggregated and useful geographical units is the census tract, of which 60,804 exist within the Continental US in the 1990 Census. Unfortunately, not every tract provides every data field due to privacy and other constraints. Restricting the final data set to observations with complete data resulted in 57,647 observations on the median price of housing (Price), median per capita income (Income), median year built (Age), population (Pop), the tract’s land area (Area), as well as the latitude and longitude of the centroid of the tract. The constructed variable Age equals 1990 less the median year constructed and was strictly positive.
