Income Segregation: Up or Down, and for Whom?
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Income Segregation: Up or Down, and for Whom? John R. Logan 1 & Andrew Foster 2 & Hongwei Xu 3 & Wenquan Zhang 4 Published online: 15 September 2020 # Population Association of America 2020
Abstract Reports of rising income segregation in the United States have been brought into question by the observation that post-2000 estimates are upwardly biased because of a reduction in the sample sizes on which they are based. Recent studies have offered estimates of this sample-count bias using public data. We show here that there are two substantial sources of systematic bias in estimating segregation levels: bias associated with sample size and bias associated with using weighted sample data. We rely on new correction methods using the original census sample data for individual households to provide more accurate estimates. Family income segregation rose markedly in the 1980s but only selectively after 1990. For some categories of families, segregation declined after 1990. There has been an upward trend for families with children but not specifically for families with children in the upper or lower 10% of the income distribution. Separate analyses by race/ethnicity show that income segregation was not generally higher among Blacks and Hispanics than among White families, and evidence of income segregation trends for these separate groups is mixed. Income segregation increased for all three racial groups for families with children, particularly for Hispanics (but not Whites or Blacks) in the upper 10% of the income distribution. Trends vary for specific combinations of race/ethnicity, presence of children, and location in the income distribution, offering new challenges for understanding the underlying processes of change. Keywords Income segregation . Neighborhoods . Sampling bias . Measurement bias
Introduction Evidence of increasing income inequality in the United States has heightened interest in the degree to which social classes separate into neighborhoods based on income. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-02000917-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* John R. Logan [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Several recent studies focusing on the post-2000 period have reported that income segregation is trending upward. For example, Bischoff and Reardon (2014:208) stated, “Socioeconomic residential sorting has grown substantially in the last forty years . . . and the bulk of that growth occurred in the 1980s and in the 2000s” (see also Florida and Mellander 2015; Fry and Taylor 2012). These reports have been questioned by the insight that the observed trends after 2000 are distorted by changes in census data collection. Logan et al. (2018) pointed out that the post-2000 income data, on which all recent measures are based, come from much smaller samples (less than 8%) in the American Community Survey (ACS) than were previously available f
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