2 ESTIMATING NET INTERRACIAL MOBILITY IN THE UNITED STATES: A RESIDUAL METHODS APPROACH

This paper presents a residual methods approach to identifying social mobility across race/ethnic categories. In traditional de-mographic accounting models, population growth is limited to changes in natural increase and migration. Other sources of pop-ulation change are absorbed by the model residual and can be es-timated only indirectly. While these residual estimates have been used to illuminate a number of elusive demographic processes, there has been little effort to incorporate shifts in racial identi-fication into formal accounts of population change. In light of growing evidence that a number of Americans view race/ethnic identities as a personal choice, not as a fixed characteristic, mobil-ity across racial categories may play important roles in the growth of race/ethnic subpopulations and changes to the composition of the United States. To examine this potential, we derive a reduced-form population balancing equation that treats fertility and inter-national migration as given and estimates survival from period life table data. After subtracting out national increase and net interna-tional migration and adjusting for changes in racial measuremen