TY - JOUR AU - Card,David AU - Mas,Alexandre AU - Rothstein,Jesse TI - Tipping and the Dynamics of Segregation JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13052 PY - 2007 Y2 - April 2007 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13052 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13052.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Card Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall, #3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510/642-5222 Fax: 510/643-7042 E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu Alexandre Mas Industrial Relations Section Firestone Library Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 Tel: 609/258-6374 E-Mail: amas@princeton.edu Jesse Rothstein Goldman School of Public Policy and Department of Economics University of California, Berkeley 2607 Hearst Avenue Berkeley, CA 94720-7320 Tel: 510/643-8561 Fax: 510/643-9657 E-Mail: rothstein@berkeley.edu AB - In a classic paper, Schelling (1971) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a critical "tipping point," all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and Census tract data from 1970 through 2000 to test for discontinuities in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition. White population flows exhibit tipping-like behavior in most cities, with a distribution of tipping points ranging from 5% to 20% minority share. The estimated discontinuities are robust to controls for a wide variety of neighborhood characteristics, and are as strong in the suburbs as in tracts close to high-minority neighborhoods, ruling out the main alternative explanations for apparent tipping behavior. In contrast to white population flows, there is no systematic evidence that rents or housing prices exhibit non-linearities around the tipping point. 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 tolerant whites have higher tipping points. ER -