A Measure of Segregation Based on Social Interactions

By Federico Echenique, Roland G. Fryer. 2007

300 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop an index of segregation based on two premises: (1) a measure of segregation should disaggregate to the level of individuals, and (2) an individual is more segregated the more segregated are the agents with whom she interacts. We present an index that satisfies (1) and (2) and that is based on agents' social interactions: the extent to which blacks interact with blacks, whites with whites, etc. We use the index to measure school and residential segregation. Using detailed data on friendship networks, we calculate levels of within-school racial segregation in a sample of U. S. schools. We also calculate residential segregation across major U. S. cities, using block-level data from the 2000 U. S. Census.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bb05e21a98be95646fa2768dd5cb2de7f7c3131

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Citations in the corpus

When Are Ghettos Bad? Lessons from Immigrant Segregation In the United States (2008, unknown): “While it possesses an intuitive interpretation, the dissimilarity index can easily be criticized (see, for example, Echenique and Fryer, 2007 ).”
The Old Boy (and Girl) Network: Social Network Formation on University Campuses (2008, methodology): “We also include a measure of each student's own-race segregation – the Spectral Segregation Index (SSI) – recently developed by Echenique and Fryer (2007).32 Finally, we include several measures of the average contemporaneous characteristics of a student's friends.”
How Homophily Affects the Speed of Learning and Best Response Dynamics (2012, background): “al (2011)) and rigorous foundations for measuring the extent of segregation (Echenique and Fryer, 2007). DeMarzo, Vayanos, and Zwiebel (2003) discuss some aspects of how segregation can affect the updating process they study, but do not formally model linking behavior as being affected by group memb”
Strategic Interaction and Networks (2010, background): “Echenique & Fryer (2007), for example, use the highest eigenvalue as a measure of segregation.”
School choice with controlled choice constraints: Hard bounds versus soft bounds (2011, background): “to the spectral segregation index of Echenique and Fryer [20] which uses the intensity of social interactions among the members of a group (see also Cutler and Glaeser [17]).”
An Economic Model of Friendship: Homophily, Minorities and Segregation (2007, background): “We now turn to examining the three observations mentioned in the introduction.(14)”
A multidisciplinary survey on discrimination analysis (2013, background): “Measures of group segregation have been proposed in a large body of literature (James and Tauber, 1985; Reardon & Firebaugh, 2002) to model group dissimilarity, isolation, and concentration, also taking into account the structure of social networks and social interactions (Echenique & Fryer, 2007).”
Prejudice in Schools: Promotion of an Inclusive Culture and Climate (2010, background): “…alone are not enough to foster improved understanding and relationships between African American and White students, and more empirical research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying intergroup relationships and how to improve them (Dickinson et al., 2001; Echenique & Fryer, 2007).”
The National Rise in Residential Segregation (2017, unknown): “…2009), and the neighborhood e↵ects and social networks that influence a range of socioeconomic outcomes (Case & Katz, 1991; Brooks-Gunn et al., 32 1993; Borjas, 1995; Cutler et al., 2008; Ananat, 2011; Ananat & Washington, 2009; Echenique & Fryer, 2007; Sethi & Somanathan, 2004; Ramcharan, 2010).”
Same Work, Lower Grade? Student Ethnicity and Teachers’ Subjective Assessments (2011, background): “Because friendship networks within schools are often strongly segregated ( Echenique & Fryer, 2007 ), the percentage of immigrant children whose best friend also has an immigration background most probably even exceeds this 70%.”
Segregation and the Quality of Government in a Cross-Section of Countries (2011, background): “[12] Echenique, Frederico and Roland Fryer, "A Measure of Segregation Based on Social Interactions," Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.”