Age at Arrival and Immigrant Segregation: A Between-Siblings Analysis

Studies of urban segregation have paid little attention to when immigrants arrive, whereas research on age at arrival has rarely considered segregation as an outcome. This study bridges these two literatures. Exploiting variation in age at arrival between siblings, we causally show that immigrants who arrive at younger ages are more likely to live in less segregated neighborhoods as adults, with the effect being particularly pronounced among refugees. A descriptive decomposition suggests that economic factors account for a larger share of the relationship among non-refugees, whereas for refugees, intermarriage and economic factors contribute roughly equally to explaining the variation in the effect of age at immigration.