EVENT: Economic Research Seminar

Abstract - Residential segregation by race first emerged in the United States as black migrants from the South arrived in northern cities in the early twentieth century. The existing literature emphasizes discriminatory institutions as the driving force behind the particularly rapid rise in segregation over this period. We use newly assembled neighborhood-level data to instead focus on the role of residential sorting by whites. Employing both nonlinear tipping and linear white flight empirical approaches, we show that white departures in response to black arrivals were quantitatively large and accelerated between 1900 and 1930. Our results indicate that sorting by whites can explain between 45 and 60 percent of the observed increase in segregation over this period. Uncoordinated market decisions appear to have been a key mechanism behind the development of racially segregated cities in the United States.