Job Relocation and the Racial Gap in Unemployment in Detroit and Chicago, 1980 to 1990
By Ted Mouw. American Sociological Review, 2000
160 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that residential segregation and job decentralization combine to adversely affect the employment opportunities of minorities. While employment is increasingly located outside of central cities, residential segregation prevents minorities from moving closer to suburban jobs. Although this hypothesis has intuitive appeal, there is little consensus regarding its empirical validity. This study (1) constructs detailed geographic measures of changes in employment opportunities, (2) estimates a fixed-effects model of changes in the unemployment rate over time, and (3) accounts for spatial correlation in the error term. Neighborhood-level employment data from 1980 and 1990 are used to measure changes in the distance to jobs from census tracts in the Detroit and Chicago metropolitan areas. In both cities, the decentralization of employment and the loss of manufacturing jobs resulted in substantial changes in the spatial distribution of employment. The empirical results indicate that a decline in the spatial proximity to employment is associated with an increase in the unemployment rate for blacks.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0fb7e7c7df954aeb9a5d8d6d8173056c292bab5
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Citations in the corpus
- Public Transit and the Spatial Distribution of Minority Employment: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (2003, background): “…as the mean commute time of neighborhood low-wage workers (Ihlanfeldt 1992; Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist 1990, 1991), spatial proximity to total jobs (Ellwood 1986; Leonard 1985; O’Regan and Quigley 1996), as well as spatial proximity to areas of high net employment growth (Raphael 1998a; Mouw 2000).”
- Proximity and opportunity: How residence and race affect the employment of welfare recipients (2002, methodology): “Following Raphael (1998) and Mouw (2000), we used a distance decay function to estimate access to different types of employment opportunity in 1997 and 1992: Accessi = ( Xj (e dij)) / ( LCi (e dik)) (A3) where Xj is a measure of job opportunity in employer tract j (the presence of the employer in…”