Isolating changes in net residential segregation from the effect of demographic factors in the U.S., 1989-2005

Ricardo Mora Villarrubia () and Javier Ruiz-Castillo ()

Economics Working Papers from Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía

Abstract: This paper investigates residential segregation trends net of changes in the racial and the neighborhood marginal population distributions. It follows two alternative strategies. First, it uses indices of two types. Indices of the first type emphasize an evenness segregation concept and are only invariant to changes in the marginal distribution by race, while those of the second type emphasize a representativeness segregation concept and are only invariant to changes in the marginal distribution by neighborhood. Second, it uses the mutual information, or the M index that is not invariant to changes in either of the marginal distributions but admits two decompositions. Each of the decompositions isolates a term which (a) is invariant to changes in the marginal distribution of one of the two variables and the entropy, or diversity, of the other, and (b) reflects changes in either an evenness or a representativeness segregation notion. According to the M index, net residential segregation in both an evenness and a representative sense considerably decreases for the U.S. public school student population in urban areas in 1989-2005. Because of their failure to control for changes in the spatial entropy, invariant indices of the first type register a smaller decline in the evenness sense, while because of their failure to control for changes in the racial entropy invariant indices of the second type register an increase in residential segregation in the representativeness sense. Within the evenness perspective, all racial groups experiment a reduction in net segregation which is greatest for Hispanics.

Keywords: Multigroup segregation; Multilevel segregation; Residential segregation; Mutual information; Entropy indices; Invariance properties; Econometric models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Date: 2008-12
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