The hypothesis of neighborhood stigma predicts that individuals who reside in areas known for high crime, poverty, disorder, and/or racial isolation embody the negative characteristics attributed to their communities and experience suspicion and mistrust in their interactions with strangers. This article provides an experimental test of whether neighborhood stigma affects individuals in one domain of social life: economic transactions. To evaluate the neighborhood stigma hypothesis, this study adopts an audit design in a locally organized, online classified market, using advertisements for used iPhones and randomly manipulating the neighborhood of the seller. The primary outcome under study is the number of responses generated by sellers from disadvantaged relative to advantaged neighborhoods. Advertisements from disadvantaged neighborhoods received significantly fewer responses than advertisements from advantaged neighborhoods. Results provide robust evidence that individuals from disadvantaged neighborhoods bear a stigma that influences their prospects in economic exchanges. The stigma is greater for advertisements originating from disadvantaged neighborhoods where the majority of residents are black. This evidence reveals that residence in a disadvantaged neighborhood not only affects individuals through mechanisms involving economic resources, institutional quality, and social networks but also affects residents through the perceptions of others.ities in the United States are characterized by high levels of racial segregation and by concentrated pockets of poverty and of affluence (1, 2). The stratification of American neighborhoods means that individuals living in disadvantaged communities are exposed to fewer economic opportunities, lower quality institutions, greater levels of crime and environmental pollution, and less advantaged social networks (3-6). However, extreme neighborhood inequality may also affect individuals through processes of association, perception, and stigma.The hypothesis of neighborhood stigma predicts that individuals who reside in areas known for high crime, poverty, disorder, and/or racial isolation embody the negative characteristics attributed to their communities, and experience suspicion and mistrust in their interactions with strangers when their neighborhood of residence is revealed (7-11). Similar to other forms of stereotype, the consequences of neighborhood stigma arise when negative perceptions of a place are attached to individuals, leading to systematic disapproval, discrimination, and/or exclusion (12, 13). Assumptions about residents from disadvantaged neighborhoods could have consequences in the form of lost job opportunities, suspicion by law enforcement, or mistrust in market transactions. Through all of these pathways, the stigma of place may be an important mechanism through which neighborhood segregation reinforces social inequality (5,(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). Despite the strong theoretical support for this concept, no previous studies have estimated the effect...

Residential and school segregation have historically mirrored each other, with school segregation seen as simply reflecting residential patterns given neighborhood-based school assignment policy. We argue that the relationship is circular, such that school options also influence residential outcomes. We hypothesize that the expansion of charter schools could simultaneously lead to an increase in school segregation and a decrease in residential segregation. We examine what happens when neighborhood and school options are decoupled via public school choice in the form of charter schools using data from the census and the Common Core of Data on a national sample of more than 1,500 metropolitan districts. We find that Black-White school segregation increased and residential segregation declined in response to increases in the charter enrollment share from 2000 to 2010. In districts with charter schools, the average increase in the charter enrollment share corresponded to a 12% increase in school segregation and 2% decline in residential segregation. We find no relationship between charter school expansion and school segregation between White and Hispanic students, perhaps because Hispanic students attend more racially diverse charters than White or Black students. White-Hispanic residential segregation declined as charter enrollment increased. Our results demonstrate that educational policy is consequential for both school and neighborhood population processes. When these two contexts are decoupled via public school choice, school and neighborhood segregation patterns move in opposite directions, rather than mirroring each other. Our findings also provide a cautionary lesson for unfettered expansion of choice without integration imperatives.

The status exchange hypothesis suggests that partners in black/white marriages in the United States trade racial for educational status, indicating strong hierarchical barriers between racial groups. The authors examine trends in status exchange in black/white marriages and cohabitations between 1980 and 2010, a period during which these unions increased from 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent of all young couples. The authors find that status exchange between black men and white women did not decline among either marriages or cohabitations, even as interracial unions became more prevalent. The authors also distinguish two factors driving exchange: (1) the growing probability of marrying a white person as educational attainment increases for both blacks and whites (educational boundaries) and (2) a direct trade of race-by-education between partners (dyadic exchange). Although the theoretical interpretation of exchange has focused on the latter factor, the authors show that status exchange largely emerges from the former.

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