Tipping and the Dynamics of Segregation in Neighborhoods and Schools

In a classic paper Schelling (1971) showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in preferences: once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a “tipping point”, all the whites leave. We use regression discontinuity methods and Census tract data from the past four decades to test for the presence of discrete non-linearities in the racial dynamics of neighborhoods. White mobility patterns in most cities exhibit tipping-like behavior, with a range of tipping points centered around a 13 % minority share. Similar patterns emerge from an analysis of school-level data over the 1990s. A variety of specifications rule out the possibility that the discontinuity in the initial minority share is driven by income stratification or other factors, pointing to an important role for white preferences over neighbors ’ race and ethnicity in the dynamic process of racial segregation. Finally, we relate the location of the estimated tipping points in different cities to measures of the racial attitudes of whites, and find that cities with more racially tolerant whites have higher tipping points.