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The Role of Homophily in Response to Labor Market Opportunities: Differences Across Race and Ethnicity

March 2026

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'The Role of Homophily in Response to Labor Market Opportunities: Differences Across Race and Ethnicity' are listed below in order of similarity.

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  We contrast the spatial mismatch hypothesis with what we term the racial mismatch hypothesis - that the problem is not a lack of jobs, per se, where blacks live, but a lack of jobs into which blacks are hired, whether because of discrimination or labor market networks in which race matters. We first report new evidence on the spatial mismatch hypothesis, using data from Census Long-Form respondents. We construct direct measures of the presence of jobs in detailed geographic areas, and find that these job density measures are related to employment of black male residents in ways that would be predicted by the spatial mismatch hypothesis - in particular that spatial mismatch is primarily an issue for low-skilled black male workers. We then look at racial mismatch, by estimating the effects of job density measures that are disaggregated by race. We find that it is primarily black job density that influences black male employment, whereas white job density has little if any influence on their employment. This evidence implies that space alone plays a relatively minor role in low black male employment rates.
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• Working Paper

  
  
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  January 2009

  Authors: Judith Hellerstein, David Neumark, Melissa McInerney

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-09-03

  Employment rates of Hispanic males in the United States are considerably lower than employment rates of whites. In the data used in this paper, the Hispanic male employment rate is 61 percent, compared with 83 percent for white men.1 The question of the employment disadvantage of Hispanic men likely has many parallels to the question of the employment disadvantage of black men, where factors including spatial mismatch, discrimination, and labor market networks have all received attention as contributing factors. However, the Hispanic disadvantage has been much less studied, and the goal of this paper is to bridge that gap. To that end, we present evidence that tries to assess which of the three factors listed above appears to contribute to the lower employment rate of Hispanic males. We focus in particular on immigrant Hispanics and Hispanics who do not speak English well.
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  CES-07-03

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  May 2008

  Authors: Rhiannon Patterson

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-08-12

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  Working Paper Number:

  CES-08-09

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