Racial Segregation and Black-White Longevity Disparities

Persistent Black-White segregation is a key mechanism shaping profound Black-White inequalities.A central assumption is that Whites explicitly benefit from racial segregation and would lose advantages afforded to them if they were to residentially integrate with Black Americans.The theoretical basis for this stems from a focus on neighborhood-level consequences of segregation that produce zero-sum outcomes.However, segregation also shapes broader, macro-level dynamics, including income segregation, the availability of public goods, and policy outcomes that likely impact all residents.In this paper, I track individuals born between 1905-1920 in the complete-count 1940 Census linked to Social Security death records and utilize an instrumental variable design that leverages county-level variation in government fragmentation to estimate the causal effect of segregation on Black and White longevity.Results reveal that a 10-point increase in Black-White segregation decreased Black longevity by 0.44 years and White longevity by 0.29 years.For Whites with lower education, segregation is particularly harmful, but for those with the highest education, the effects are attenuated by 0.10 years.These results highlight that processes of racial stratification also affect Whites and contest straightforward zero-sum conceptions of segregation effects.