TY - JOUR
T1 - Was postwar suburbanization "white flight"? Evidence from the black migration
AU - Boustan, Leah Platt
N1 - Funding Information:
∗I appreciate helpful suggestions from Edward Glaeser (the editor), two anonymous referees, my dissertation committee (Claudia Goldin, Caroline Hoxby, Lawrence Katz, and Robert A. Margo), and numerous colleagues at UCLA. I enjoyed productive conversations with Lee Alston, David Clingingsmith, William J. Collins, Carola Frydman, Christopher Jencks, Jesse Rothstein, Albert Saiz, and Raven Saks. I received useful comments from seminar participants at the All-UC Conference for Labor Economics, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the KALER group at UCLA, New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service, the Society of Labor Economists, the University of British Columbia, UC-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and the Wharton School. Michael Haines generously shared some of the data used in this study. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Multi-disciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy at Harvard University. [email protected].
PY - 2010/2
Y1 - 2010/2
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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U2 - 10.1162/qjec.2010.125.1.417
DO - 10.1162/qjec.2010.125.1.417
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:69649083737
SN - 0033-5533
VL - 125
SP - 417
EP - 443
JO - Quarterly Journal of Economics
JF - Quarterly Journal of Economics
IS - 1
ER -