Measuring Social Environment MobilityS. T. Ly and
Arnaud Riegert
Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques Abstract: Individuals experience a diversity of social environments throughout their lives. When measuring the degree to which different social groups are separated from each other, this fact is often overlooked: standard segregation indices always measure spatial separation at a given point in time. These segregation indices only tell one part of the story, just like income inequality indices do not take into account the fact that individuals are mobile across the income distribution throughout their lives. This paper introduces the notion of social environment mobility (SEM) and proposes tools and a methodology to analyze it. We show that unlike income mobility, SEM cannot erase segregation in the long run, and we derive an upper bound on SEM indices. We illustrate this concept using data on segregation in French middle schools. Our results show that SEM has a fairly high equalizing effect on within-school segregation but a low overall effect due to low mobility between schools. Keywords: Mobility; Segregation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nse:doctra:g2015-04 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Documents de Travail de l'Insee - INSEE Working Papers from Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.