segregation 7 Flashcards
(15 cards)
What are the normative objections to segregation?
Segregation can seem unfair and is often the product of bias, hatred, or imbalances of power.
What two descriptive questions guide the study of segregation’s effects in this framework?
- What happens to minority and white households when there is segregation?
- What are the implications of segregation for economic productivity, health, and well-being?
What key question does Derenoncourt (2019) investigate regarding the Great Migration?
Whether the influx of Black southern migrants into Northern ‘high-opportunity’ cities altered the upward mobility those places offered.
Which prior finding motivated Derenoncourt’s study of city-level opportunity?
Chetty et al. (2018) showed that some places yield better long-term outcomes for children (‘higher-opportunity places’) than others.
What drove the Great Migration, according to Derenoncourt?
Black workers moved North in search of increased economic and social opportunities.
In Derenoncourt’s thought experiment, what happens if one ‘high-opportunity’ city randomly receives more Black southern migrants than another?
The subsequent level of opportunity that city offers does change—so migration shocks do affect local opportunity.
How did cities that received larger Black migrant inflows respond in terms of schooling?
They saw increased private school enrollment among white families.
What changes occurred in public safety and criminal justice spending in those cities?
They increased police spending and experienced higher incarceration rates among residents.
After large Black migrant inflows, what happened to the measured opportunity in ‘high-opportunity’ areas?
Formal measures of ‘high opportunity’ fell—Black men’s mobility rankings dropped (regardless of income).
Did these changes in city attributes affect the economic mobility of white residents?
No—there was no real effect on white households’ subsequent mobility.
What broader lesson does Derenoncourt draw from the Great Migration experience?
Places that offered higher opportunity initially can lose that status when white residents withdraw from shared schools and neighborhoods.
How do local governments inadvertently ‘undo’ a city’s high-opportunity attributes?
By increasing spending on policing and incarceration, reinforcing segregation and inequality.
Why is it difficult to identify the causal consequences of segregation?
Because segregation is not randomly assigned, making traditional causal inference hard.
What strategy can researchers use to approximate random assignment in segregation studies?
Find natural experiments or policy changes that create quasi-random variation in segregation exposure.
Why are studies of school segregation often easier than those of residential segregation?
Because many school districts have explicit random or lottery-based assignment policies that create clean quasi-experimental variation.
