TY  - JOUR
AU  - Easterly,William
TI  - Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15069
PY  - 2009
Y2  - June 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15069
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15069.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
William Easterly
New York University
Department of Economics
19 W. 4th Street, 6th floor
New York NY 10012
Tel: 212/992-8684
Fax: 212/995-4186
E-Mail: william.easterly@nyu.edu
AB  - The Schelling model of a "tipping point" in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of "tipping" explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the US from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more "white flight" out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods
ER  -