TY  - JOUR
AU  - Boustan,Leah Platt
TI  - Was Postwar Suburbanization "White Flight"? Evidence from the Black Migration
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13543
PY  - 2007
Y2  - October 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13543
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13543.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Leah Platt Boustan
Department of Economics
8283 Bunche Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477
Tel: 310/794-4263
Fax: 310/825-9528
E-Mail: lboustan@econ.ucla.edu
AB  - Residential segregation by jurisdiction generates disparities in public services and education. The distinctive American pattern – in which blacks live in cities and whites in suburbs – was enhanced by a large black migration from the rural South. I show that whites responded to this black influx by leaving cities and rule out an indirect effect on housing prices as a sole cause. I instrument for changes in black population by using local economic conditions to predict black migration from southern states and assigning predicted flows to northern cities according to established settlement patterns. The best causal estimates imply that each black arrival led to 2.7 white departures.
ER  -