DOI: https://doie.org/10.0709/2024539433
BOISHAMPAYAN CHATTERJEE
Keywords:Racial residential segregation, Employment decentralization, Black unemployment, Spatial mismatch hypothesis
Spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that housing market discrimination limits black residential choice in the suburbs, making the jobs growing in suburbs inaccessible to them. This paper tests whether decline in housing market segregation reduces black unemployment in the event of job decentralization. Furthermore, the empirical framework used in this paper will also test whether there exists significant differences in the impact of job suburbanization on black unemployment due to difference in the residential segregation levels of metropolitan area. The long difference and panel instrumental variable regressions find no significant evidence that racial residential integration reduces black unemployment. The study concludes that spatial mismatch plays a relatively minor role in explaining the persistence of unemployment for blacks. If jobs fail to hire blacks for reasons unrelated to space, then improving access of blacks to areas with more jobs would not increase employment for blacks.