TY - JOUR AU - Card,David AU - Mas,Alexandre AU - Rothstein,Jesse TI - Are Mixed Neighborhoods Always Unstable? Two-Sided and One-Sided Tipping JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14470 PY - 2008 Y2 - November 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14470 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14470.pdf N1 - Author contact info: David Card Department of Economics 549 Evans Hall, #3880 University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 Tel: 510/642-5222 Fax: 510/643-7042 E-Mail: card@econ.berkeley.edu Alexandre Mas Industrial Relations Section Firestone Library Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 Tel: 609/258-6374 E-Mail: amas@princeton.edu Jesse Rothstein Goldman School of Public Policy University of California, Berkeley 2607 Hearst Avenue Berkeley, CA 94720-7320 Tel: 510/643-8561 Fax: 510/643-9657 E-Mail: rothstein@berkeley.edu AB - A great deal of urban policy depends on the possibility of creating stable, economically and racially mixed neighborhoods. Many social interaction models – including the seminal Schelling (1971) model -- have the feature that the only stable equilibria are fully segregated. These models suggest that if home-buyers have preferences over their neighborhoods' racial composition, a neighborhood with mixed racial composition is inherently unstable, in the sense that a small change in the composition sets off a dynamic process that converges to either 0% or 100% minority share. Card, Mas, and Rothstein (2008) outline an alternative "one-sided" tipping model in which neighborhoods with a minority share below a critical threshold are potentially stable, but those that exceed the threshold rapidly shift to 100% minority composition. In this paper we examine the racial dynamics of Census tracts in major metropolitan areas over the period from 1970 to 2000, focusing on the question of whether tipping is "two-sided" or "one-sided". The evidence suggests that tipping behavior is one-sided, and that neighborhoods with minority shares below the tipping point attract both white and minority residents. ER -