School segregation and native flight. Quasi-experimental evidence from Norway

Ethnic or racial segregation in schools and neighborhoods remains a persistent reality in most major cities in Western countries. Although extensively theorized, determining the exact mechanisms that produce such patterns has proven difficult. In this article, we investigate one of the potential causes of ethnic segregation in schools; native flight motivated by parents’ school preferences. Both observational and experimental evidence suggests that native or White parents have a strong preference for racially or ethnically homogeneous schools. If this is the case, this may strongly contribute to school segregation. In contexts where school enrollment is determined primarily by geographic proximity to schools, such preferences may prompt White or native parents to move away from schools with high racial or ethnic minority shares among students, thus contributing to both residential and school segregation. Drawing on extremely detailed, population-wide, geo-coded register data on families and school catchment areas for elementary schools in Oslo, the capital of Norway, we investigate whether native parents move away from schools with higher shares students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. We employ a Geographic Regression Discontinuity (GRD) design by exploiting the fact that within neighborhoods, the characteristics of schools differ discontinuously along school catchment area borders. The results indicate that native origin families systematically move away from schools with high shares of students with non-Western immigrant backgrounds. This process likely contributes to both school segregation and residential segregation.

Immigration and the Neighborhood

Within metropolitan areas, neighborhoods of growing immigrant settlement are becoming relatively less desirable to natives. We deploy a geographic diffusion model to instrument for the growth of immigrant density in a neighborhood. Our approach deals explicitly with potential unobservable shocks that may be correlated with proximity to immigrant enclaves. The evidence is consistent with a causal interpretation of an impact from growing immigrant density to native flight and relatively slower housing value appreciation. Further evidence indicates that these results are driven more by the demand for residential segregation based on ethnicity and education than by foreignness per se. (JEL I20, J11, J15, R23, Z13)