Understanding the land use determinants of Asian American segregation

Between the 2000 and 2010 decennial Censuses, the US Asian American population share grew from 3.6% to 4.7%.  In certain states and regions, the growth of the Asian American population has been even more rapid.  Moreover, they often exhibit high levels of residential segregation in metropolitan areas across multiple measures.  This paper investigates the metropolitan land use determinants of Asian American segregation.  Understanding the effects of such determinants is a complex research question, as scholarship in this area has examined multiple definitions, operational specifications, and empirical measures of both land use and segregation, often using varied sources of data.  This paper therefore makes three principal contributions to the literature.  First, using data from the 2010 Census and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey, the paper examines the effects of metropolitan land use on the five principal dimensions of segregation proposed by Massey and Denton (1988): evenness, isolation, concentration, centralization, and clustering.  Second, the paper controls for multiple measures of residential land use and, most notably, the interaction between such measures.  Previous research has controlled for multiple land use attributes, but it has largely done so under the assumption that the effect on segregation of a particular attribute does not depend upon the degree of another attribute.  This paper incorporates the growing recognition in the literature that metropolitan land use patterns often exhibit combinations of high-sprawl and low-sprawl features.  Regression analysis indicates that such interactions are statistically significant.  Third, it investigates the endogeneity of metropolitan land use using instrumental variables regression.  The results of this study, which document contrasting effects of metropolitan land use patterns on Asian American segregation, advance the understanding of the broader structural and demographic changes facing the US economy in the years ahead.