Racial Segregation in Everyday Mobility Patterns: Disentangling the Effect of Travel Time

There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Abstract

Nascent research documents that U.S. racial segregation is not merely a residential phenomenon but is present in everyday mobility patterns. Better understanding the causes of mobility-based segregation requires disentangling the spatial macrosegregation, which constitutes an obvious confounding factor. In this work, the author analyzes big data on everyday visits between 270 million neighborhood dyads to estimate the effect of neighborhood racial composition on mobility patterns, net of driving, walking, and public transportation travel time. Matching on these travel times, the author finds that residents of Black and Hispanic neighborhoods visit White neighborhoods only slightly less than they visit other Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Distinctly, residents of White neighborhoods are far less likely to visit non-White neighborhoods than other White neighborhoods, even net of travel time. The author finds that this travel time–adjusted visit homophily among White neighborhoods is greater in commuting zones where White neighborhoods are situated closer to non-White neighborhoods.

Related collections

Most cited references 37

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

Causal Inference without Balance Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching

S. M. Iacus, Melony King, G. Porro (2012)

0 comments Cited 384 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: not found
Article: not found

tmap: Thematic Maps in R

Martijn Tennekes, Daniela Dunkler (2018)

0 comments Cited 182 times – based on 0 reviews      Review now

Bookmark

Record: found
Abstract: found
Article: found

Is Open Access

Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective*

Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones … (2019)

We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven by differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Hispanic Americans have rates of intergenerational mobility more similar to whites than blacks, leading the Hispanic-white income gap to shrink across generations. Second, differences in parental marital status, education, and wealth explain little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. The few areas with small black-white gaps tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood have significantly better outcomes. However, fewer than 5% of black children grow up in such areas. Our findings suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.