The effects of highways on school segregation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of interstate highway building on school segregation in US cities. The simple ordinary least squares (OLS) model might suffer from endogeneity bias and therefore an instrumental variables (IV) model is employed to account for endogeneity of highway routes. Dissimilarity and interaction indices are used to measure segregation and the results of the OLS and IV models indicate that school segregation increased due to the additions to the highway system. The estimates suggest that highways can explain 7–10% of the variation in school segregation.