Replication code for: 'The causal impact of segregation on a disparity: A gap-closing approach'

Segregation---whether across schools, neighborhoods, or occupations---is regularly invoked as a cause of social and economic disparities. But segregation is a complicated causal treatment: what do we mean when we appeal to a world in which segregation does not exist? One could take societal contexts as the unit of analysis and compare across societies with differing levels of segregation. In practice, it is more common for studies of segregation to take persons or households as the unit of analysis within a single societal context, focusing on what would happen if particular individuals were counterfactually assigned to social positions in a more equitable way. Taking this latter framework, this paper shows how to study segregation as a cause. The first step is to theorize a counterfactual assignment rule: what would it mean to assign people to social positions equitably? The second step is to identify the causal effect of those social positions and simulate counterfactual outcomes. The third step is to interpret results as the impact of a unit-level (rather than society-level) intervention. A running example and empirical analysis illustrates the approach by studying the causal effect of occupational segregation on a racial health gap.

无论是学校、社区还是职业领域的社会隔离（Segregation），常被援引为社会与经济不平等的诱因。但社会隔离是一类复杂的因果干预：当我们假设不存在社会隔离的世界时，究竟该作何定义？一种研究路径是以社会情境为分析单位，对比不同社会隔离水平的社会。而在实际研究中，更常见的做法是以单一社会情境下的个人或家庭为分析单位，聚焦于若将特定个体以更公平的方式反事实分配至社会位置时，将会产生何种结果。本文采用后一种研究框架，阐释了如何将社会隔离作为因果因素开展研究：第一步是构建反事实分配规则的理论模型——以公平方式将个体分配至社会位置究竟意味着什么；第二步是识别这些社会位置的因果效应，并模拟反事实结果；第三步是将研究结果解读为单位层面（而非社会层面）干预的影响。本文借助一则贯穿全文的示例与实证分析，通过探究职业隔离对种族健康差距的因果效应，展示了该研究方法的具体应用。