Using data for North Carolina public school students in grades 3 to 8, we examine achievement gaps between white students and students from other racial and ethnic groups. We focus on cohorts of students who stay in the state's public schools for all six years. While the black-white gaps are sizable and robust, both Hispanic and Asian students tend to gain on whites as they progress in school. Beyond simple mean differences, we find that the racial gaps in math between low-performing students have tended to shrink as students progress through school, while those for high-performing students have generally widened.

This paper uses decennial Census data to examine the residential integration of the foreign born in the United States between 1910 and 2000. Immigrant segregation declined in the first part of the century, but has been rising over the past few decades. Recent immigrants tend to hail from countries with greater cultural distinctions from U.S. natives, whether economic, racial, or linguistic. These factors explain much of the increase in segregation after 1970. Evidence also points to changes in urban form, particularly native-driven suburbanization and the decline of public transit as a transportation mode, as an explanation for the new immigrant segregation.

This paper analyzes how community heterogeneity influences resident decisions to undertake actions generating public benefits. The decision in question is completing and returning the 2000 Census questionnaire, an action which secures a significant amount of federal grants for the community. The model developed to explain this action allows members of societal groups to differentially value public benefits that accrue to other group members. Racial, generational, and socioeconomic class heterogeneity all predict significantly lower response rates at the county level. The potential for endogenous sorting into heterogeneous counties implies that the magnitude of true behavioral effects exceeds these estimates.

Studies attempting to link locational attributes and individual outcomes often focus on children or young adults, under the presumption that their location was exogenously determined by their parents. This strategy is more difficult to justify if parents migrate selectively and tend to transmit their own characteristics to their children. This paper uses Census microdata to document a strong link between selective migration in one generation and economic outcomes in the next. I show that selective migration is a possible explanation for a puzzle in the existing literature: the changing relationship between segregation levels and individual outcomes within the black population.