Browsing by Subject "Segregation"

Urban problems have several features that make them inherently dynamic. Large transaction costs all but guarantee that homeowners will do their best to consider how a neighborhood might change before buying a house. Similarly, stores face large sunk costs when opening, and want to be sure that their investment will pay off in the long run. In line with those concerns, different areas of Economics have made recent advances in modeling those questions within a dynamic framework. This dissertation contributes to those efforts.

Chapter 2 discusses how to model an agent’s location decision when the agent must learn about an exogenous amenity that may be changing over time. The model is applied to estimating the marginal willingness to pay to avoid crime, in which agents are learning about the crime rate in a neighborhood, and the crime rate can change in predictable (Markovian) ways.

Chapters 3 and 4 concentrate on location decision problems when there are externalities between decision makers. Chapter 3 focuses on the decision of business owners to open a store, when its demand is a function of other nearby stores, either through competition, or through spillovers on foot traffic. It uses a dynamic model in continuous time to model agents’ decisions. A particular challenge is isolating the contribution of spillovers from the contribution of other unobserved neighborhood attributes that could also lead to agglomeration. A key contribution of this chapter is showing how we can use information on storefront ownership to help separately identify spillovers.

Finally, chapter 4 focuses on a class of models in which families prefer to live

close to similar neighbors. This chapter provides the first simulation of such a model in which agents are forward looking, and shows that this leads to more segregation than it would have been observed with myopic agents, which is the standard in this literature. The chapter also discusses several extensions of the model that can be used to investigate relevant questions such as the arrival of a large contingent high skilled tech workers in San Francisco, the immigration of hispanic families to several southern American cities, large changes in local amenities, such as the construction of magnet schools or metro stations, and the flight of wealthy residents from cities in the Rust belt, such as Detroit.

What does justice require of us in the personal realm of intimate association? Many seemingly innocent choices at the heart of private life, such as our tendency to sort ourselves into groups of friends, partners, and neighbors who share our social identities, play a significant role in perpetuating social segregation and its concomitant inequalities. And oftentimes, we rely on structures such as informal social norms, selective rules of club membership, or local land-use policies to protect these associational choices. I call this the problem of sorting. Because these choices are in the private realm, there is significant tension between personal liberty, especially the freedom of association, and the demands of justice. I begin this dissertation by using empirical social science to outline the problem of sorting. Individuals have reasons to take political action in favor of shaping their search environments according to these criteria, and they also have reasons to offer social opportunities to the excluded. The state should take positive steps to create diverse search environments. However, the state ought not interfere in our actual associations, and individuals have no duties to form substantive associations with the excluded. I conclude that this understanding of freedom of association and its concomitant duties reduces the tension that we began with, though it does not eliminate it.

Debate about the development of African American English (AAE) dominated sociolinguistic inquiry for the second half of the 20th century and continues to be a subject of investigation. All hypotheses about the development of AAE integrate ideas of shared linguistic features coupled with strong regional influences or founding effects. Most Southern evidence used in the development of these hypotheses, however, is from rural communities or somehow unique enclave communities. The early urban centers of African American life in the South that followed the abolition of slavery and disintegration of plantation life have seldom been investigated with respect to the development of AAE. This study examines precisely those sites looking at AAE in three Southern urban centers during the time of Jim Crow or institutionalized segregation: Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans.

This analysis is based on a series of tape-recorded oral history interviews that were conducted as part of the Behind the Veil project at Duke University. The Behind the Veil project was launched in 1990 at Duke and the majority of the interviews were conducted between 1994 and 1997. Each speaker completed a survey regarding her/his life history, education, professional history, and family background. The speakers used for this study were chosen based on age (all born before 1942) and residency status in their respective communities - all speakers are lifelong residents of Birmingham, Memphis, or New Orleans. These criteria and others shape an inclusive corpus of 100 total tape-recorded interviews with 33 from Birmingham, 35 from Memphis, and 32 from New Orleans.

Quantitative analysis of five core diagnostic structures of AAE (i.e. copula absence, plural -s, pre-vocalic consonant cluster reduction, rhoticity, and 3rd person singular verbal -s) was performed to provide a window for determining the shared and distinct patterns of early, urban AAE development. These data are used for inter-generational analyses, cross-gender analyses, analyses of socioeconomic factors and overall interpretation for each individual site and between different sites.

These data contribute to the continuing study and scholarship on the historical development of African American English, providing the first multi-community overview of core African American English linguistic variables from the early urban South. The trans-regional similarities of linguistic variables in AAE speakers are often attributed to the influence of early Southern English varieties. These data confirm the early presence of these variables in African American urban centers in the South, but also suggest how language ideologies relate to dialect development.