353 research outputs found

    How Long Do African Americans Stay in High-Poverty Neighborhoods? An Analysis of Spells

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    Discussions of high-poverty neighborhoods often assume that their residents are a distinct population trapped in poor neighborhoods for long durations. This paper examines this claim by calculating the first estimates of duration of residence in high-poverty neighborhoods for the African-American population. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics matched to census tract data and a model of movement among neighborhood types adopted from Bane and Ellwood (1983, 1986) and McGinnis (1968), I derive measures of the duration of stays in high-poverty neighborhoods. A large share of the black population will experience a short spell of residence in an extremely poor neighborhood at some time over a 10-year period. Many of the residents of nonpoor and poor neighborhoods at a point in time, however, will be there for long spells. Among poor African Americans, reentry to high-poverty neighborhoods following an exit is common. Patterns of stays in high-poverty neighborhoods are more complex and heterogeneous than usually supposed.

    Dynamics of Transformation from Segregation to Mixed Wealth Cities

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    We model the dynamics of the Schelling model for agents described simply by a continuously distributed variable - wealth. Agents move to neighborhoods where their wealth is not lesser than that of some proportion of their neighbors, the threshold level. As in the case of the classic Schelling model where segregation obtains between two races, we find here that wealth-based segregation occurs and persists. However, introducing uncertainty into the decision to move - that is, with some probability, if agents are allowed to move even though the threshold level condition is contravened - we find that even for small proportions of such disallowed moves, the dynamics no longer yield segregation but instead sharply transition into a persistent mixed wealth distribution. We investigate the nature of this sharp transformation between segregated and mixed states, and find that it is because of a non-linear relationship between allowed moves and disallowed moves. For small increases in disallowed moves, there is a rapid corresponding increase in allowed moves, but this tapers off as the fraction of disallowed moves increase further and finally settles at a stable value, remaining invariant to any further increase in disallowed moves. It is the overall effect of the dynamics in the initial region (with small numbers of disallowed moves) that shifts the system away from a state of segregation rapidly to a mixed wealth state. The contravention of the tolerance condition could be interpreted as public policy interventions like minimal levels of social housing or housing benefit transfers to poorer households. Our finding therefore suggests that it might require only very limited levels of such public intervention - just sufficient to enable a small fraction of disallowed moves, because the dynamics generated by such moves could spur the transformation from a segregated to mixed equilibrium.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

    Eliminating Ditransitives

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    Abstract. We discuss how higher arity verbs such as give or promise can be treated in an algebraic framework that admits only unary and binary relations and does not rely on event variables

    The Rationality of Prejudices

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    We model an -player repeated prisoner's dilemma in which players are given traits (e.g., height, age, wealth) which, we assume, affect their behavior. The relationship between traits and behavior is unknown to other players. We then analyze the performance of “prejudiced” strategies—strategies that draw inferences based on the observation of some or all of these traits, and extrapolate the inferred behavior to other carriers of these traits. Such prejudiced strategies have the advantage of learning rapidly, and hence of being well adapted to rapidly changing conditions that might result, for example, from high migration or birth rates. We find that they perform remarkably well, and even systematically outperform both Tit-For-Tat and ALLD when the population changes rapidly
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