Was Postwar Suburbanization ‘White Flight’? Evidence from the Black Migration.” Working paper

Abstract: Residential segregation across jurisdiction lines generates disparities in public services and education by race. The distinctive American pattern – in which blacks live in the center city and whites in the suburban ring – was enhanced by a large black migration from the rural South during and after World War II. I show that urban whites responded to this black influx by leaving central cities and rule out an indirect effect on urban housing prices as a sole cause. I instrument for black arrivals by assigning predicted black migrant flows from southern states to northern cities according to established settlement patterns. The best causal estimates imply that each black arrival led to 2.7 white departures