Beyond Racial Attitudes: The Role of Outside Options in the Dynamics of White Flight

Peter Q. Blair

No 31136, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: When the fraction of minorities in a neighborhood exceeds the tipping point white flight accelerates. I develop a revealed-preference method to estimate the tipping points of 38,000 census tracts and the preferences of households for minority neighbors in the 123 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) covered by these census tracts over 40 years (1970-2010). I find that the average tipping point in an MSA initially covaries more with the racial attitudes of households than the outside options that they face but that this relationship reverses overtime. Ignoring outside options would obscure the declining role that racial attitudes play in understanding segregation.

JEL-codes: J60 R21 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31136.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:31136

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w31136

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).