HAPPY IN THE HOOD? THE IMPACT OF RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION ON SELF‐REPORTED HAPPINESS

Previous research consistently finds that racially based residential segregation is associated with poor economic, health, and social outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between residential segregation and self‐reported happiness. Using panel data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH), we begin by estimating ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions of happiness on a measure of MSA‐level segregation, controlling for a rich set of individual, neighborhood, regional, and state characteristics. The OLS results suggest that increased segregation is associated with a reduction in happiness among blacks. To deal more appropriately with the potential endogeneity of location choice, we extend the methodology to fully exploit the panel structure of the NSFH and incorporate individual fixed effects into the happiness equation. Contrary to the OLS results, our fixed effects estimates imply that blacks are happier in more segregated metropolitan areas. The paper discusses the implications of these results within the context of current integration policies.     

The City as a Focus for Human Capital Migration: Towards a Dynamic Analysis of University Human Capital Contributions

Universities’ contributions to urban development frequently focus on their micro- or macro-scale effects, ignoring the meso-scale effects they have on inter-territorial relationships. Although universities are seen as an essential part of the recipe for successful urban development, there is a lacuna to understanding how they make places and shape urban hierarchies, and this article addresses this question. This article focuses on one university–urban development process, the creation and embedding of highly skilled graduates, to explore what the aggregate effects of universities on places are; it develops a set of indicators to measure graduate attraction and retention as well as the overall composite place effect. The article develops a typology based on these three indicator sets, and tests this using a data set developed from a Polish social media website. It finds that these indicators are a good way of measuring the effects of human capital creation and mobility at the urban scale. The article concludes by arguing that a greater focus is required in studying the roles that universities play in fostering through-flow in places, changing these places’ nature as nodes within wider urban systems and hierarchies, in the context of university–regional development.