What drives racial segregation? New evidence using Census microdata

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Notes: Center Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayThe authors would like to thank Fernando Ferreira (University of California, Berkeley) for outstanding research assistance, as well as Pedro Cerdan and Jackie Chou for help assembling the data. We would also like to thank Debbie Reed, Steve Ross, Jon Sonstelie, Chris Udry, Junfu Zhang and seminar participants at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and Yale for helpful comments. We are grateful to the California Census Research Data Center for providing access to the data and to Ritch Milby in particular. All output included in this paper has been subject to thorough disclosure analysis by Census Bureau officials and meets stringent standards to safeguard confidentiality. Financial support from the Public Policy Institute of California is gratefully acknowledged. Please send correspondence to any of the authors: patrick.bayer@yale.edu, mcmillan@chass.utoronto.ca, or rueben@ppic.org This paper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network electronic library at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=428742An index to papers in the Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper Series is located at: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~egcenter/research.htm What Drives Racial Segregation? New Evidence Using Census MicrodataPatrick Bayer, Robert McMillan, and Kim Rueben AbstractThis paper sheds new light on the forces that drive residential segregation on the basis of race, assessing the extent to which across-race differences in other household characteristics can explain a significant portion of observed racial segregation. The central contribution of the analysis is to provide a transparent new measurement framework for understanding segregation patterns. This framework allows researchers to characterize patterns of segregation, to decompose them in meaningful ways, and to carry out partial equilibrium counterfactuals that illuminate the contributions of a variety of non-race characteristics in driving segregation. We illustrate our approach using restricted micro-Census data from the San Francisco BayArea that provide a rich joint distribution of household and neighborhood characteristics not previously available to the research community. In contrast to findings in the prior literature, our analysis indicates that individual household characteristics can explain a considerable fraction of segregation by race, explaining...

Inter-neighborhood Migration and Spatial Assimilation in a Multi-ethnic World: Comparing Latinos, Blacks and Anglos

“…However, in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of access to neighborhoods defined by their racial composition, greater support is found for the weak version. Both Alba and Logan (1993) and Bayer, McMillan, and Rueben (2004) find that, among blacks, income is strongly related to neighborhood racial composition, and Crowder, South, and Chavez (2006) observe stronger effects of socioeconomic status on mobility into more Anglo neighborhoods among blacks than among whites. However, studies of interneighborhood migration have yet to compare systematically the effects of socioeconomic resources among blacks, Latinos, and Anglos, so whether blacks are more or less able than Latinos, and whether Latinos are more or less able than whites, to convert SES into spatial proximity with Anglos is unknown.…”

The low income housing tax credit and racial segregation

“…We include demographic characteristics of metropolitan areas, including population, share minority, share foreign born, poverty rate, age distribution and education (Cutler, Glaeser and Vigdor, 1999;Bayer, McMillan and Reuben, 2004;Farley and Frey, 1994. ) Finally we include a number of characteristics describing the metropolitan housing stock, such as the percent of the housing stock built within the past 5 years (Farley and Frey, 1994), and the homeownership rate in an MSA (Ellen, 2000).…”

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“…Studies using individual-level data to focusing on spatial assimilation and spatial attainment first appeared in the 1980s (e.g., Massey and Mullan 1984;Massey and Denton 1985) and then with increasing frequency in the 1990s and beyond (e.g., Alba and Logan 1993;Alba et al 1999;Bayer et al 2004;Crowder and South 2005;Crowder et al 2006;Logan et al 1996;Crowder 1997, 1998;South et al 2005a, b;South et al 2008). But, as valuable as this literature has been, it has remained fundamentally disconnected from the literature investigating segregation at the aggregate level.…”

“…Stronger income effects can be discerned using detailed income tabulations, but these tabulations do not include the other social characteristics in the analysis. 14 A study by Bayer et al (2004) takes a step in this direction by using restricted access census data to conduct refined individual-level analyses of residential contact. The framework I set forth here makes it possible to implement this kind of study to investigate uneven distribution.…”