| Abstract: | This paper examines whether social capital in a neighborhood is influenced by its design, taking the cul‐de‐sac as a special case. It offers two contributions: using carpooling to school as a proxy for social capital and a precise definition of the neighborhood using geo‐coded survey data from California. Living in a cul‐de‐sac neighborhood is found to increase the probability of carpooling, but the effect loses statistical significance when residential self‐selection is accounted for. The analysis reveals competing insights about the self‐selection behavior that must be resolved before neighborhood design can be considered an effective policy tool for enhancing social capital. |
