The implications of digital school quality information for neighbourhood and school segregation: Evidence from a natural experiment in Los Angeles
利用洛杉矶时报网站公布学校增值评价数据这一外生信息冲击，研究发现该信息对居住分选和社区种族隔离无显著影响，但对学校分选有适度影响，尤其对拉丁裔和亚裔学生，但未实质性改变学校种族隔离，因为高、低增值学校的种族构成在信息冲击前后大致相似。
A digital information explosion has transformed cities’ residential and educational markets in ways that are still being uncovered. Although urban stratification scholars have increasingly scrutinised whether emerging digital platforms disrupt or reproduce longstanding segregation patterns, direct links between one theoretically important form of digital information – school quality data – and neighbourhood and school segregation are rarely drawn. To clarify these dynamics, we leverage an exogenous digital information shock, in which the Los Angeles Times ’ website revealed measures of a particularly important school quality proxy – schools’ value-added effectiveness – for nearly all elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Results suggest that although the information shock had no detectable effects on residential sorting or neighbourhood racial segregation, it did exert modest effects on school sorting – particularly for Latino and Asian students – albeit not in ways that materially diminished school racial segregation because the racial compositions of high- and low-value-added schools were broadly similar both before and after the information shock. We conclude that the urban stratification implications of digital information may be more nuanced than often appreciated, with effects operating through mechanisms beyond residential segregation and reflecting racial heterogeneity in constraints and preferences vis-à-vis specific types of information.