Ethnic Drift and White Flight: A Gravity Model of Neighborhood Formation

Jessie Bakens, Raymond Florax and Peter Mulder

No 16-062/VIII, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Ethnicity has become an increasingly important factor in neighborhood formation in many developed economies. We specify a gravity model for neighborhoods to assess the role of ethnicity in intra-urban residential relocations. Migration patterns of different ethnic groups are hypothesized to depend on bilateral socioeconomic, demographic and ethnic differences between origin and destination neighborhoods. We account for heterogeneous and interdependent location preferences of natives and several immigrant groups. In addition, we incorporate friction measures of ethnic population shares and a diversity indicator to allow for nonlinear and asymmetric effects of the population composition on ethnic sorting and spatial clustering. We utilize a unique micro data set of place-to-place migrants across neighborhoods in the urban agglomerations of Amsterdam and The Hague, in The Netherlands. Our results provide evidence of ethnic drift leading to clustering of ethnic minority groups and "white flight" of native Dutch residents. Taken together, our findings suggest a preference for living among people of one's own ethnic group, but in a sufficiently diverse neighborhood. We discuss ways to extend and apply our gravity approach to further analyze intra-urban residential relocation flows.

Keywords: neighborhood formation; ethnicity; diversity; immigrants; gravity model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 F22 J15 J61 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/16062.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ethnic drift and white flight: A gravity model of neighborhood formation (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tin:wpaper:20160062

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().