IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp8093.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are Ghettos Good or Bad? Evidence from U.S. Internal Migration

Author

Listed:
  • Zhang, Junfu

    (Clark University)

  • Zheng, Liang

    (Central University of Finance and Economics)

Abstract

It is difficult to determine whether ghettos are good or bad, partly because racial segregation may have some effects that are unobservable. To overcome this challenge, we present a migration choice model that allows for estimating the overall effects of racial segregation. The key idea underlying our empirical approach is that if segregation indeed has a negative overall effect, migrants should be willing to give up some earnings to avoid living in segregated cities. Using decennial census data from 1980 to 2000, we provide new evidence that ghettos are bad. It is shown that both black and white migrants prefer to live in less segregated cities. For example, for a one-percentage-point reduction in the dissimilarity index, the estimated marginal willingness to pay of blacks is $436 (in 1999 dollars) in 2000. Among whites, this marginal willingness to pay is $301.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhang, Junfu & Zheng, Liang, 2014. "Are Ghettos Good or Bad? Evidence from U.S. Internal Migration," IZA Discussion Papers 8093, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8093
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp8093.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Epple, Dennis & Zelenitz, Allan, 1981. "The Implications of Competition among Jurisdictions: Does Tiebout Need Politics?," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(6), pages 1197-1217, December.
    2. Maisy Wong, 2013. "Estimating Ethnic Preferences Using Ethnic Housing Quotas in Singapore," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 80(3), pages 1178-1214.
    3. Patrick Bajari & Matthew E. Kahn, 2005. "Estimating Housing Demand With an Application to Explaining Racial Segregation in Cities," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 23, pages 20-33, January.
    4. Ferreira, Fernando, 2010. "You can take it with you: Proposition 13 tax benefits, residential mobility, and willingness to pay for housing amenities," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(9-10), pages 661-673, October.
    5. Patrick Bayer & Fernando Ferreira & Robert McMillan, 2007. "A Unified Framework for Measuring Preferences for Schools and Neighborhoods," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 115(4), pages 588-638, August.
    6. Steven T. Berry, 1994. "Estimating Discrete-Choice Models of Product Differentiation," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 25(2), pages 242-262, Summer.
    7. Junfu Zhang, 2011. "Tipping And Residential Segregation: A Unified Schelling Model," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(1), pages 167-193, February.
    8. Gordon B. Dahl, 2002. "Mobility and the Return to Education: Testing a Roy Model with Multiple Markets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(6), pages 2367-2420, November.
    9. Caroline M. Hoxby, 2000. "Does Competition among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(5), pages 1209-1238, December.
    10. Roback, Jennifer, 1982. "Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(6), pages 1257-1278, December.
    11. David T. Ellwood, 1986. "The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Are There Teenage Jobs Missing in the Ghetto?," NBER Chapters, in: The Black Youth Employment Crisis, pages 147-190, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Bayer, Patrick & Keohane, Nathaniel & Timmins, Christopher, 2009. "Migration and hedonic valuation: The case of air quality," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 58(1), pages 1-14, July.
    13. Christopher Timmins, 2007. "If You Cannot Take The Heat, Get Out Of The Cerrado … Recovering The Equilibrium Amenity Cost Of Nonmarginal Climate Change In Brazil," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 1-25, February.
    14. Timothy J. Bartik, 2008. "Measuring the Benefits of Amenity Improvements in Hedonic Price Models," Book chapters authored by Upjohn Institute researchers, in: Richard E. Just & Darrell L. Hueth & Andrew Schmitz (ed.),Applied Welfare Economics, pages 643-654, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
    15. Jesse Rothstein, 2007. "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers? Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 2026-2037, December.
    16. Weinberg, Bruce A., 2000. "Black Residential Centralization and the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 110-134, July.
    17. John F. Kain, 1968. "Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 82(2), pages 175-197.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zhang, Junfu & Zheng, Liang, 2015. "Are people willing to pay for less segregation? Evidence from U.S. internal migration," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(C), pages 97-112.
    2. Liang Zheng, 2016. "What city amenities matter in attracting smart people?," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 95(2), pages 309-327, June.
    3. Nicolai V. Kuminoff & V. Kerry Smith & Christopher Timmins, 2010. "The New Economics of Equilibrium Sorting and its Transformational Role for Policy Evaluation," NBER Working Papers 16349, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Nicolai V. Kuminoff & V. Kerry Smith & Christopher Timmins, 2013. "The New Economics of Equilibrium Sorting and Policy Evaluation Using Housing Markets," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(4), pages 1007-1062, December.
    5. Patrick Bayer & Stephen L. Ross, 2006. "Identifying Individual and Group Effects in the Presence of Sorting: A Neighborhood Effects Application," Working papers 2006-13, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics, revised Jan 2009.
    6. Sinha, Paramita & Caulkins, Martha & Cropper, Maureen L., 2018. "Do Discrete Choice Approaches to Valuing Urban Amenities Yield Different Results Than Hedonic Models?," RFF Working Paper Series 18-02, Resources for the Future.
    7. Klaiber, H. Allen, 2014. "Migration and household adaptation to climate: A review of empirical research," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 539-547.
    8. Sinha, Paramita & Caulkins, Martha & Cropper, Maureen, 2021. "The value of climate amenities: A comparison of hedonic and discrete choice approaches," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    9. Leah Platt Boustan, 2013. "Racial Residential Segregation in American Cities," NBER Working Papers 19045, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Wenquan Liang & Ran Song & Christopher Timmins, 2020. "Frictional Sorting," NBER Working Papers 27643, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Baum-Snow, Nathaniel & Ferreira, Fernando, 2015. "Causal Inference in Urban and Regional Economics," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 3-68, Elsevier.
    12. Ferreira, Fernando, 2010. "You can take it with you: Proposition 13 tax benefits, residential mobility, and willingness to pay for housing amenities," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(9-10), pages 661-673, October.
    13. Wong, Maisy, 2018. "A tractable approach to compare the hedonic and discrete choice frameworks," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 135-141.
    14. David Albouy & Walter Graf & Ryan Kellogg & Hendrik Wolff, 2016. "Climate Amenities, Climate Change, and American Quality of Life," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 3(1), pages 205-246.
    15. Albouy, David & Lue, Bert, 2015. "Driving to opportunity: Local rents, wages, commuting, and sub-metropolitan quality of life," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(C), pages 74-92.
    16. Koşar, Gizem & Ransom, Tyler & van der Klaauw, Wilbert, 2022. "Understanding migration aversion using elicited counterfactual choice probabilities," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 231(1), pages 123-147.
    17. Bayer, Patrick & McMillan, Robert, 2012. "Tiebout sorting and neighborhood stratification," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(11), pages 1129-1143.
    18. Patrick Bayer & Fernando Ferreira & Robert McMillan, 2004. "Tiebout Sorting, Social Multipliers and the Demand for School Quality," NBER Working Papers 10871, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Dworak-Fisher, Keenan, 2004. "Intra-metropolitan shifts in labor demand and the adjustment of local markets," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(3), pages 514-533, May.
    20. Freeman, Richard & Liang, Wenquan & Song, Ran & Timmins, Christopher, 2019. "Willingness to pay for clean air in China," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 94(C), pages 188-216.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    internal migration; residential segregation; discrete choice model;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)
    • R23 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8093. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Holger Hinte (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaade.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.