Groups' contribution to shaping ethnic residential segregation: a dynamic approach

Abstract

Some have argued it is possible to infer different groups’ contributions to ethnic residential segregation from their individual neighborhood preferences. From this perspective, natives tend to be more segregation-promoting than non-natives, since they prefer neighborhoods where they are the majority. It remains unclear, however, whether this holds when one evaluates their contributions to segregation within a dynamic perspective. Using register data from Statistics Sweden, I define and model ten different groups’ residential behavior based on their ethnicity and family composition. I thereby simulate the residential mobility of the full population of Stockholm municipality residents from 1998 to 2012. Even though my results at the micro-level are consistent with previous studies, the simulation results show that foreign singles’ mobility patterns are more segregation-promoting than any other groups, since this group shows a greater in-group feedback effect regarding choice of new neighborhoods, an effect that increases their flow from low-to-high segregated neighborhoods progressively. My results suggest that (1) integration initiatives would be more efficient if focused on this particular group and (2) a proper evaluation of micro-behaviors’ implications for macro-patterns of segregation requires a dynamic approach accounting for groups’ heterogeneous behaviors and their main interdependencies on shaping segregation over time.

If you move, I move: The social influence effect on residential mobility

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Schools’ priority rules and ethnic school segregation

“…First, it shows that school choice responds not only to rational choice considerations under which the reform was conceived (Thelin and Niedomysl 2015), such as schools' educational characteristics (Böhlmark, Holmlund, and Lindahl 2015), but also significantly weighs non-educational aspects such as distance-to-school, reputation, and schools' ethnic share, among others. Second, selecting schools based on their ethnic composition has immediate and cumulative effects on school segregation (Tapia 2021). The former refers to how school selection changes segregation immediately after the academic year begins.…”

“…In the second phase of the study, we implement a large-scale empirically calibrated-simulation model (Arvidsson, Collet, and Hedström 2021;Tapia 2021). This simulation aims to overcome some limitations of the previous approach.…”

Free to Choose? : Studies of Opportunity Constraints and the Dynamics of School Segregation

“…So-called empirically calibrated agent-based models allow researchers to study a given macro-level phenomenon using a realistic representation of the situation Methods based on empirically relevant characteristics of agents and their environment (Tapia, 2021). These models are especially useful (1) to verify the relationship between micro and macro, (2) to counterfactually test the extent to which a macro outcome may be attributable to various micro mechanisms, (3) to examine how different manipulations of the relevant micro mechanisms affect the macro outcome, and (4) to study policy-oriented questions addressing the potential unintended consequences of policy implementation.…”