Was Postwar Suburbanization “White Flight”? Evidence from the Black Migration^*

Abstract

Residential segregation by jurisdiction generates disparities in public services and education. The distinctive American pattern-in which blacks live in cities and whites in suburbs-was enhanced by a large black migration from the rural South. I show that whites responded to this black influx by leaving cities and rule out an indirect effect on housing prices as a sole cause. I instrument for changes in black population by using local economic conditions to predict black migration from southern states and assigning predicted flows to northern cities according to established settlement patterns. The best causal estimates imply that each black arrival led to 2.7 white departures.

Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women

“…Leah Boustan (2007) notes this problem and assesses its quantitative importance. She compares results from instruments that assign either the actual or the predicted migrant flows, where the predictions are based on push factors from source areas, and finds little difference between the two.…”

The Economic Consequences of Social Network Structure

“…This phenomenon helps to explain a pattern in which blacks live in cities and whites in suburbs: for instance, American metropolitan areas are segregated by race, both by neighborhood and across jurisdiction lines. In 1980, after a century of suburbanization, 72% of metropolitan blacks lived in central cities, compared to 33% of metropolitan whites (Boustant (2010)). The general point is that even slight homophilistic preferences can generate dramatically different outcomes compared to neutral preferences.…”

The labor demand was downward sloping: Disentangling migrants’ inflows and outflows, 1929–1957

“…In fact, natives might have responded to in-and outflows by relocating their labor or capital across states. Notably, during this period there was an important reallocation of labor: the movement of blacks from southern to northern states, 7 relocation of white natives from urban to suburban areas (Boustan, 2010), and numerous other internal responses to local labor market shocks (Ferrie, 2006). Second, Bandiera et al (2010) showed that INS immigration statistics substantially 4 CPI collected from the U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (1984-05-11).…”