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.

中文翻译：

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数字学校质量信息对邻里和学校隔离的影响：来自洛杉矶自然实验的证据


数字信息爆炸式增长已经改变了城市的住宅和教育市场，而这些变化至今仍未被发现。尽管城市分层学者越来越多地审视新兴的数字平台是否破坏或复制了长期存在的隔离模式，但一种理论上重要的数字信息形式——学校质量数据——与社区和学校隔离之间的直接联系很少被划定。为了阐明这些动态，我们利用了外生性数字信息冲击，其中《洛杉矶时报》的网站揭示了洛杉矶联合学区几乎所有小学的一个特别重要的学校质量代理指标——学校的增值效率。结果表明，尽管信息冲击对住宅分类或社区种族隔离没有可检测的影响，但它确实对学校分类产生了适度的影响——特别是对拉丁裔和亚裔学生——尽管没有以实质性减少学校种族隔离的方式，因为高附加值和低附加值的学校的种族构成在信息冲击之前和之后都大致相似。我们得出的结论是，数字信息的城市分层影响可能比通常认识到的更微妙，其影响通过超越住宅隔离的机制运作，并反映了相对于特定类型信息的约束和偏好的种族异质性。