Residential Segregation and the Geography of Opportunities: Spatial Dependence and Spatial Heterogeneity of Education in the City of Santiago

Carolina Flores, University of Texas at Austin

This paper analyzes the consequences of socioeconomic residential segregation on children’s educational outcomes. The analysis focuses on the city of Santiago, Chile, using the Chilean Census of 2002 in combination with individual and school data from the national standardized test. Multilevel and spatial models are implemented with the aim of analyzing the problems of spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence in education. Preliminary results demonstrate that spatial socioeconomic segregation negatively affects educational outcomes beyond and above household poverty. This negative effect remains after controlling for the type and quality of the school. In addition, the results change with the scale of analysis. The effect of segregation on educational outcomes tends to be more negative when segregation is measured at a small scale rather than a large one. Spatial models provide evidence that there are educational benefits that trickle down from a school to schools within its vicinity.