Understanding the effects of school catchment areas and households with children in ethnic residential segregation

Households with children have been suggested to play a key role in ethnic residential segregation. One possible mechanism is that school district boundaries affect their segregation patterns, but direct evidence on this is scarce. This study investigates the role of school catchment areas for ethnic residential segregation among different types of households in the city of Helsinki, Finland, using individual-level register-based data covering the complete population of the city between 2005 and 2014. The analyses consist of three steps: a description of ethnic segregation among different types of households with segregation indices, an analysis of mobility flows between school catchment areas, and a boundary discontinuity analysis of the causal effects of the boundaries of catchment areas on the mobility of different types of Finnish-origin households. The analyses show that ethnic segregation is stronger among households with children than among childless households and the residential mobility of higher-income Finnish-origin households with children is particularly affected by the school catchment area boundaries.