Racial Residential Segregation in American Cities

Leah Boustan

No 19045, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This chapter examines the causes and consequences of black-white residential segregation in the United States. Segregation can arise through black self-segregation, collective action to exclude blacks from white neighborhoods, or individual mobility of white households. Historically, whites used racially restrictive covenants and violence to exclude blacks from white areas. More recently, white departures from integrated neighborhoods is a more important factor. Many studies find that blacks who live in segregated metropolitan areas have lower educational attainment and lower earnings than their counterparts in more integrated areas. This difference appears to reflect the causal effect of segregation on economic outcomes. The association between segregated environments and minority disadvantage is driven in part by physical isolation of black neighborhoods from employment opportunities and in part by harmful social interactions within black neighborhoods, especially due to concentrated poverty. The chapter ends by reviewing potential policy solutions to residential segregation, which can be classified as place-based, people-based, or indirect solutions.

JEL-codes: R23 R58 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05
Note: DAE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published as Racial Residential Segregation in American Cities Leah Platt Boustan The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning Edited by Nancy Brooks, Kieran Donaghy, and Gerrit‐Jan Knaap

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19045.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:19045

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19045

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 ().