Speaker: Professor Donald Ray Davis, Columbia University

Host: Professor Xiao Wei from RIEM

Time: April 25, 2025 (Friday) 13:30-15:30

Location: Conference Room 1211, Gezhi Building, Liulin Campus, SWUFE

Organizer: RIEM

Speaker's Profile

Donald R. Davis is the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University. He completed his undergraduate studies in Social and Ethical Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University. He taught at Harvard University from 1992 to 1999 and has served as Chair of the Economics Department at Columbia University. In addition, he has served on the editorial boards of numerous academic journals and as President of the Urban Economics Association. Professor Davis’s research spans various fields of spatial economics, including international trade, economic geography, regional economics, and urban economics. His research involves empirical testing of trade theories, market size advantages in international trade, and issues related to trade and inequality. In recent years, his research has also focused on the distribution of skills across cities of different sizes and social integration within cities.

Abstract

Existing empirical research in economics on neighborhood racial sorting is overwhelmingly premised on the idea that racial preferences for a location depend on the racial shares in that location, without considering potential spatial spillover effects from nearby areas. Does this matter for the way we view the cross-section and dynamics of racial neighborhood segregation? We nest Schelling (1971)’s bounded neighborhood and spatial proximity theories within a discrete choice model, where the key distinction is precisely such spatial spillovers. We simulate the model and examine the data for 1970-2000 for more than 100 U.S. metros. Two features of the data are most compelling: the powerful presence of racial clusters and the fact that drastic racial change is concentrated at the boundary of these clusters. Both point to the spatial proximity model as the proper foundation for a theory of racial neighborhood evolution. We use these insights to revisit prominent results on racial tipping where our theory guides us to distinguish differences by location. While prior research pointed to powerful racial tipping in the form of White exit, we show this is largely driven by theoretically-distinct “biased white suburbanization” leading to White entry in remote areas. In urban areas far from existing Minority clusters, we find zero or small tipping effects, at odds with a bounded neighborhood interpretation. The most consistent effects of tipping, still of modest size, are found in areas adjacent to existing Minority clusters, confirming the relevance of the racial spillovers of the spatial proximity model. Existing research conflates these quite distinct effects. Overall, our results suggests that tipping is a less central feature of racial neighborhood change than suggested in prior research and that greater attention needs to be paid to spatial dimensions of the problem.