We examine whether individuals are influenced to file for bankruptcy by the past bankruptcies of their close neighbors. We find that a one standard deviation increase in neighborhood bankruptcies increases the probability of defaulting via bankruptcy rather than via credit card charge-off by 6%. Our individual level data on defaulters is from detailed credit card accounts, which is matched to n...

Unpaid caring is defined as any help or support provided to family members, friends, neighbours, or others because of their long-term physical or mental health or disability, or problems related to old age. It is estimated that there are over 5.2 million unpaid carers in England and Wales (2001 Census). Using the Small Area Microdata from the 2001 Census Samples of Anonymised Records, we examin...

Physical activity (PA) promotes healthy life and contributes to sustainable development. In this paper, we rely on the Utah Household Travel Survey data and analyze the determinants of PA in terms of neighborhood land use, accessibility to transportation, and socio-demographic status in Salt Lake County, Utah, United States using four-component walkability indices at various geographic scales. ...

There is a need for greater understanding of how perceptions and objective measures of the physical environment influence physical activity among seniors. The goal of this study was to examine the degree of association between perceived and objective characteristics of the neighborhood environment and the relation of each type of measurement to neighborhood walking in older adults. Data on self...

BACKGROUND Multiple and varied benefits have been suggested for increased neighborhood walkability. However, spatial inequalities in neighborhood walkability likely exist and may be attributable, in part, to residential segregation. OBJECTIVE Utilizing a spatial demographic perspective, we evaluated potential spatial inequalities in walkable neighborhood amenities across census tracts in Bost...

Objective measures of environmental attributes have been used to understand how neighborhood environments relate to physical activity. However, this method relies on detailed spatial data, which are often not easily available. Walk Score® is a free, publicly available web-based tool that shows how walkable a given location is based on objectively-derived proximity to several types of local dest...

Ecological approaches to explaining juvenile delinquency emphasize the importance of spatial influences on patterns of delinquency. Studies of recidivism among juvenile offenders, on the other hand, have rarely taken neighborhood influences into account. Moreover, conventional statistical approaches adapted for investigating spatial neighborhood effects, such as hierarchical linear modeling (HL...

BACKGROUND There is limited longitudinal evidence confirming the role of neighborhood environment attributes in encouraging people to walk more or if active people simply choose to live in activity-friendly neighborhoods. Natural experiments of policy changes to create more walkable communities provide stronger evidence for a causal effect of neighborhood environments on residents' walking. O...

Landscape ecology starts from the assumption that diversity and spatial arrangement of ecosystem mosaics have ecological implications and tries to understand the interactions between diversity and structure of large spatially heterogeneous areas and their ecological functions. These assumptions imply effective use of earth observation techniques and geographic information systems, enabling a gl...