This paper presents a multigroup and multilevel approach to the study of residential segregation for the public school population in U.S. urban areas in 1989 and 2005. The multigroup approach includes Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, blacks and whites. The multilevel approach distinguishes neighborhoods, cities, and regions, leading to notions of within-cities, between-cities, and between-regions residential segregation. Measures of these notions are computed using the Mutual Information, or M segregation index. The decomposability properties of the M index are exploited for two purposes: first, to identify the smallest set of regions in the U.S. which include similar states in terms of racial mix; and second, to establish the precise relationship between our measurements and the classic residential segregation literature that focuses on pairwise comparisons. Among the empirical results, three findings should be highlighted. First, the set of regions and racial groups for whom between-regions and between-cities segregation is important differs from the set for whom the within-cities component dominates. Second, minorities’ segregation declines but their population share goes up, while whites’ population share declines but their segregation index increases. Third, the portion of segregation disregarded by the traditional pairwise approach is large in all cases and increasing in the case of withincities segregation between whites and blacks.
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Paper provided by Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía in its series Economics Working Papers with number
we086128.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Robert Hutchens, 2004.
"One Measure of Segregation,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 45(2), pages 555-578, 05.
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