In a classic paper, Schelling (1971) showed that extreme segregation can arise from
social interactions in preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a
"tipping point", all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and
Census tract data from the past four decades to test for the presence of discrete nonlinearities
in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition. White mobility patterns
in most cities exhibit tipping-like behavior, with a range of tipping points centered
around a 13% minority share. These patterns are very pronounced during the 1970s
and 1980s, and diminish but do not disappear in the 1990s. We find similar dynamic
patterns in neighborhoods and in schools. A variety of specification checks rule out the
possibility that the discontinuity in the initial minority share is driven by income
stratification or other factors, and underscore the importance of white preferences over
neighbors ' race and ethnicity in the dynamic process of segregation. Finally, we relate
the location of the estimated tipping points in different cities to measures of the racial
attitudes of whites, and find that cities with more racially tolerant whites have higher
tipping points.
Jesse Rothstein
A key attraction of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is that it encourages
work. But EITC-induced increases in labor supply may drive wages down, permitting
employers of low-skill labor to capture some of the intended transfer and negatively
impacting workers in the same labor markets who are ineligible for the credit. I
exploit variation in tax treatment across family types and skill levels to identify the
e¤ect of a large EITC expansion in the mid 1990s on the female labor market, using a
semiparametric reweighting strategy to decompose changes in the wage distribution
into changes in skill-speci c prices and quantities. The EITC expansion induced
many low- and mid-skill single mothers to enter the labor force. Contemporaneous
technical change led to increases in wages, but these were smaller than they would
have been with a stable EITC. Ceteris paribus, low-skill single mothers keep only
70 cents of every dollar they receive through the EITC. Employers of low-skill labor
capture 72 cents, 30 cents from single mothers plus 43 cents from ineligible (childless)
workers whose after-tax incomes fall when the EITC is expanded. The net transfer
to workers is less than a third of the amount spent on the program.
A great deal of urban policy depends on the possibility of creating stable, economically and
racially mixed neighborhoods. Many social interaction models- including the seminal
Schelling (1971) model- have the feature that the only stable equilibria are fully segregated.
These models suggest that if home-buyers have preferences over their neighborhoods' racial
composition, a neighborhood with mixed racial composition is inherently unstable, in the
sense that a small change in the composition sets off a dynamic process that converges to
either 0% or 100% minority share. Card, Mas, and Rothstein (2008) outline an alternative
"one-sided" tipping model in which neighborhoods with a minority share below a critical
threshold are potentially stable, but those that exceed the threshold rapidly shift to 100%
minority composition. In this paper we examine the racial dynamics of Census tracts in
major metropolitan areas over the period from 1970 to 2000, focusing on the question of
whether tipping is "two-sided" or "one-sided". The evidence suggests that tipping behavior
is one-sided, and that neighborhoods with minority shares below the tipping point attract
both white and minority residents.
Racial segregation is often blamed for some of the achievement gap between blacks and whites. We study
the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across
different metropolitan areas, using large microdata samples for the 1998-2001 test cohorts. Our models
include detailed controls for the family background of individual test-takers, school-level controls for
selective participation in the test, and city-level controls for racial composition, income, and region. We
find robust evidence that the black-white test score gap is higher in more segregated cities. Holding
constant family background and other factors, a shift from a fully segregated to a completely integrated
city closes about one-quarter of the raw black-white gap in SAT scores. Specifications that distinguish
between school and neighborhood segregation suggest that neighborhood segregation has a consistently
negative impact but that school segregation has no independent effect (though we cannot reject equality of
the two effects). We find similar results using Census-based data on schooling outcomes for youth in
different cities. Data on enrollment in honors courses suggest that within-school segregation increases
when schools are more highly integrated, potentially offsetting the benefits of school desegregation and
accounting for our findings.
Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on unemployment exits separately during the earlier period of benefit expansion and the later period of
rollback. In both periods, we find little or no effect on job-finnding but a reduction
in labor force exits due to benefit availability. We estimate that the rollbacks
reduced the labor force participation rate by about 0.1 percentage point in early
2014.