This paper investigates residential segregation trends net of changes in the racial and the neighborhood marginal population distributions. It follows two alternative strategies. First, it uses indices of two types. Indices of the first type emphasize an evenness segregation concept and are only invariant to changes in the marginal distribution by race, while those of the second type emphasize a representativeness segregation concept and are only invariant to changes in the marginal distribution by neighborhood. Second, it uses the mutual information, or the M index that is not invariant to changes in either of the marginal distributions but admits two decompositions. Each of the decompositions isolates a term which (a) is invariant to changes in the marginal distribution of one of the two variables and the entropy, or diversity, of the other, and (b) reflects changes in either an evenness or a representativeness segregation notion. According to the M index, net residential segregation in both an evenness and a representative sense considerably decreases for the U.S. public school student population in urban areas in 1989-2005. Because of their failure to control for changes in the spatial entropy, invariant indices of the first type register a smaller decline in the evenness sense, while because of their failure to control for changes in the racial entropy invariant indices of the second type register an increase in residential segregation in the representativeness sense. Within the evenness perspective, all racial groups experiment a reduction in net segregation which is greatest for Hispanics.
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Paper provided by Universidad Carlos III, Departamento de Economía in its series Economics Working Papers with number
we086229.
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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