This National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship will create new knowledge about the relationship between residential segregation and crime. This project will develop statistical and economic models to ascertain the direction of causality between segregation and crime, in addition to investigating the optimum levels of racial integration that minimize crime rates. Previous research has not given much attention to these questions and consequently overlooks the possibility that residential segregation may not cause crime if levels of racial segregation remain stagnant while crime rates decline.
Using a uniquely constructed dataset, the Fellow will investigate how the stability of neighborhood racial segregation is causally related to the precipitous and unexpected decline in crime during the mid to late 1990s. This period presents a unique opportunity to understand whether the decline in crime was caused by segregation stabilization or slight gains racial integration because of vast economic expansion and minimal changes in residential locations by race. By holding constant the level of segregation, or when increases in segregation cease for a neighborhood, the Fellow will dissect changes in crime rates that would not be due to increases in segregation beyond its initial neighborhood level. This would be evidence that segregation does not cause the waxing or waning of crime rates. The major implication would be that crime rates cause segregation or have no effect.
The Fellow will use cities that did not experience changes in their segregation measures as counterfactuals for cities that experienced change by employing an innovative and new methodological technique in experimental and causal studies: the synthetic control method. This method will allow the Fellow to make causal inferences in comparative case studies with aggregate data, even if the data contain a single city that is exposed to an event or intervention (segregation stability) over time.
This research project will be conducted at the University of Washington, under the direction of Dr. Ross Matsueda in the Sociology Department. Dr. Matsueda?s current and previous work explores the role of segregation, racial perceptions, and urban structural inequality in explaining urban crime patterns using a variety of statistical methods. His research incorporates social demography with careful analyses of crime, and the University of Washington has both the relevant contacts and intellectual resources necessary to carry out the Fellow?s proposed research and training in crime, methods, and demography.
The Fellow intends to expand his training by auditing courses on crime, graphical information systems, and statistics (Bayesian and hierarchical models). The fellowship tenure will enable the Fellow to submit dissertation articles for publication, complete and present this proposed project, and attend departmental seminars in demography, statistics, and sociology.
