The Role of Social Connections in the Racial Segregation of US Cities

Andreas Diemer, Tanner Regan () and Cheng Keat Tang ()

No 2025-008, Working Papers from The George Washington University, The Center for Economic Research

Abstract: We study the extent of segregation in the social space of urban America. We measure segregation as the (lack of) actual personal connections between neighbourhoods as opposed to conventional measures that assume the strength of these connections. We distinguish social segregation from geographical definitions of segregation, building and comparing city-level indices of each. We apply our measures to the 75 largest MSAs in the USA. Cities like Miami, Washington DC, and Cincinnati rank higher in social segregation than they do based on the conventional residential isolation, while New Orleans, San Francisco, and Richmond fall in ranks. Conditional on residential segregation, cities with more institutions that foster social cohesion (churches and community associations) are less socially segregated. Looking at within-city variation across neighbourhoods, growing up more socially exposed to non-White neighbourhoods is related to various adulthood outcomes (jailed, income rank, married, and non-migrant) for Black individuals. Social exposure to non-White neighbourhoods is related to worsening adulthood outcomes in neighbourhoods that are majority non-White. Our results suggest that social connections, beyond residential location or other spatial relationships, are important for understanding the effective segregation of race in America.

Keywords: Residential and Social Segregation; Networks; Social connectedness. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2025-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/2025-008.pdf First version, 2025 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Role of Social Connections in the Racial Segregation of US Cities (2023)
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:gwc:wpaper:2025-008

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from The George Washington University, The Center for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by GW Economics Department ().