To tip or not to tip, is that a Question?

The social interaction model that was introduced by Card, Mas and Rothstein in 2008 assumes that neighbourhoods can be racially mixed and stable up to the point where the share of immigrants reaches a critical value, known as the tipping point. Once the share of immigrants reaches and exceeds this tipping point, the natives will exit the neighbourhood. Based on the fact that the Netherlands has received large groups of immigrants over time and that they usually settle down in neighbourhoods where there are already other immigrants residing, this research tries to answer the following question: Can we identify tipping points in the six largest cities in the Netherlands and have they changed over time? This done for the periods 1998-2003, 2004-2012 and 1998-2012. The data was collected from the website of Statistics Netherlands and was gathered at the zip code level. By using the structural break method we find four tipping points for the period 1998-2003, ranging from 10,65% to 26,01%. For the period 2004-2012 five tipping points we found, ranging from 21,18% to 48,08%. The same exercise yields two tipping points for the period 1998-2012, 16,45% and 17,11%. When we compare the results for the period 1998 - 2003 with those of the period 2004 - 2012 we see that the tipping points in the second period are almost twice as high.