Panethnicity, Ethnicity, and Nativity in Residential Choice

Melissa Chiu, University of California, Los Angeles

This paper furthers the understanding of panethnic versus ethnic boundary-making, via residential choices. I study how people respond to local panethnic versus ethnic composition when making residential choices, where mobility is a measure of racial tolerance and interracial relations. This paper investigates whether or not ingroup preferences and outgroup avoidance behaviors operate in residential mobility, especially comparing the differences when group concentration is defined by panethnicity versus ethnicity. I find that people respond less to local size of the same panethnic group and more to concentration of people of the same ethnicity. In addition, groups with very large immigrant populations are substantially more likely to respond positively to ethnic composition rather than panethnic composition. I examine these issues for four panethnic groups- whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians, at the labor market area level, using restricted data from the 1990 U.S. Census. I employ nested discrete choice models to test hypotheses.