“Immigrants and Native Flight: Geographic Extent and Heterogeneous Preferences”
Professor Albert Saiz is the Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Saiz serves as the Director of MIT’s Urban Economics Lab, which conducts research on real estate economics, urban economics, housing markets, local public finance, zoning regulations, global real estate, and demographic trends affecting urban and real estate development worldwide.
Before joining MIT, Saiz was a Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and an award-winning Assistant Professor of Real Estate and Economics in the MBA Core Program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Abstract: “Is ethnic segregation in Europe driven by native flight or immigrant self-isolation? If the former, which natives avoid immigrants? Which immigrants? What is the geographic scope of homophilic residential preferences? We answer these questions using a matched panel containing the universe of individuals and properties in Denmark from 1987 through 2017. We take advantage of the quasi-random nature of refugee placements and simulated exogenous Markov-chain predictions to generate experimental variation regarding local immigrant arrivals. We find strong evidence of native flight, even at the building level. Flight is stronger among the old and a reaction to the arrival of low-income immigrants. As neighborhoods become more immigrant-dense, subsequent move-ins are more likely to be other immigrants or young, low-income native citizens without children.”.
