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Spatial Influences on the Employment of U.S. Hispanics: Spatial Mismatch, Discrimination, or Immigrant Networks?
January 2009
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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Neighbors and Co-Workers: The Importance of Residential Labor Market Networks
January 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-01
We specify and implement a test for the importance of network effects in determining the establishments at which people work, using recently-constructed matched employer-employee data at the establishment level. We explicitly measure the importance of network effects for groups broken out by race, ethnicity, and various measures of skill, for networks generated by residential proximity. The evidence indicates that labor market networks play an important role in hiring, more so for minorities and the less-skilled, especially among Hispanics, and that labor market networks appear to be race-based.
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Choices of Metropolitan Destinations by the 1995-2000 New Immigrants Born in Mexico and India: Characterization and Multivariate Explanation
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-27
Using the confidential long-form records of the 2000 population census, we study the choices of metropolitan destinations made by the Mexican-born and Indian-born immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1995-2000. Based on the application of a multinomial logit model to the data of each of these two ethnic groups, our main findings are as follows. The destination choice behaviors of both ethnic groups were in general consistent with the major theories of migration. Both groups were subject to (1) the attraction of co-ethnic communities and (2) the positive effects of wage level and total employment growth. With respect to the job increases in different wage deciles, both ethnic groups share the pattern that the less educated were subject to the pull of increase in low-wage jobs, whereas the better educated were subject to the pull of increase in high-wage jobs. With respect to the possibility of competitions against other foreignborn ethnics, both ethnic groups were found to be more prone to selecting destinations where their co-ethnics represented a relatively high proportion of the foreign-born population. The main differences in destination choice behaviors between the two ethnic groups resulted partly from the fact that the relative explanatory powers of our chosen explanatory factors differed substantially between the two ethnic groups. The Mexican-born were more subject to the attractions of (1) larger co-ethnic communities, (2) greater overall employment growth, (3) more job increases in low wage deciles, and (4) greater share of the foreign-born population by coethnics. In contrast, the Indian-born were more attracted by (1) higher wage level, and (2) more job increases in high wage deciles.
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Neighborhood Effects on High-School Drop-Out Rates and Teenage Childbearing: Tests for Non-Linearities, Race-Specific Effects, Interactions with Family Characteristics, and Endogenous Causation using Geocoded California Census Microdata
May 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-12
This paper examines the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and the likelihood that a youth will drop out of high school or have a child during the teenage years. Using a dataset that is uniquely wellsuited to the study of neighborhood effects, the impact of the neighborhood poverty rate and the percentage of professionals in the local labor force on youth outcomes in California is examined. The first section of the paper tests for non-linearities in the relationship between indicators of neighborhood distress and youth outcomes. Some evidence is found for a break-point at low levels of poverty. Suggestive but inconclusive evidence is also found for a second breakpoint, at very high levels of poverty, for African-American youth only. The second part of the paper examines interactions between family background characteristics and neighborhood effects, and finds that White youth are most sensitive to neighborhood effects, while the effect of parental education depends on the neighborhood measure in question. Among White youth, those from single-parent households are more vulnerable to neighborhood conditions. The third section of the paper finds that for White youth and Hispanic youth, the relevant neighborhood variables appear to be the own-race poverty rates and the percentage of professionals of youths' own race. The final section of the paper estimates a tract-fixed effects model, using the results from the third section to define multiple relevant poverty rates within each tract. The fixed-effects specification suggests that for White and Hispanic youth in California, neighborhood effects remain significant, even with the inclusion of controls for any unobserved family and neighborhood characteristics that are constant within tracts.
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A Warm Embrace or the Cold Shoulder: Wage and Employment Outcomes in Ethnic Enclaves
April 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-09
This paper examines how immigrant enclaves influence labor market outcomes. We examine the effect of ethnic concentration on both immigrant earnings and employment in high immigration states using the non-public use, 1-in-6 sample of the 2000 U.S. Census. Although we find that there is some variability in the estimated enclave effects, they exhibit an overall negative impact. Male and female immigrants from several ethnic groups tend to earn lower wages when residing in areas with larger ethnic concentrations. Similarly, for employment, most of the statistically significant effects are negative, although much smaller than the enclave impacts on earnings.
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Changes in Workplace Segregation in the United States Between 1990 and 2000: Evidence from Matched Employer-Employee Data
June 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-15
We present evidence on changes in workplace segregation by education, race, ethnicity, and sex, from 1990 to 2000. The evidence indicates that racial and ethnic segregation at the workplace level remained quite pervasive in 2000. At the same time, there was fairly substantial segregation by skill, as measured by education. Putting together the 1990 and 2000 data, we find no evidence of declines in workplace segregation by race and ethnicity; indeed, black-white segregation increased. Over this decade, segregation by education also increased. In contrast, workplace segregation by sex fell over the decade, and would have fallen by more had the services industry - a heavily female industry in which sex segregation is relatively high - not experienced rapid employment growth.
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How Does Geography Matter in Ethnic Labor Market Segmentation Process? A Case Study of Chinese Immigrants in the San Francisco CMSA
March 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-09
In the context of continuing influxes of large numbers of immigrants to the United States, urban labor market segmentation along the lines of race/ethnicity, gender, and class has drawn considerable growing attention. Using a confidential dataset extracted from the United States Decennial Long Form Data 2000 and a multilevel regression modeling strategy, this paper presents a case study of Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco metropolitan area. Correspondent with the highly segregated nature of the labor market as between Chinese immigrant men and women, different socioeconomic characteristics at the census tract level are significantly related to their occupational segregation. This suggests the social process of labor market segmentation is contingent on the immigrant geography of residence and workplace. With different direction and magnitude of the spatial contingency between men and women in the labor market, residency in Chinese immigrant concentrated areas is perpetuating the gender occupational segregation by skill level. Whereas abundant ethnic resources may exist in ethnic neighborhoods and enclaves for certain types of employment opportunities, these resources do not necessarily help Chinese immigrant workers, especially women, to move upward along the labor market hierarchy.
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Workplace Segregation in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Skill
January 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-02
We study workplace segregation in the United States using a unique matched employer employee data set that we have created. We present measures of workplace segregation by education and language, and by race and ethnicity, and . since skill is often correlated with race and ethnicity we assess the role of education- and language-related skill differentials in generating workplace segregation by race and ethnicity. We define segregation based on the extent to which workers are more or less likely to be in workplaces with members of the same group, and we measure segregation as the observed percentage relative to maximum segregation. Our results indicate that there is considerable segregation by education and language in the workplace. Among whites, for example, observed segregation by education is 17% (of the maximum), and for Hispanics, observed segregation by language ability is 29%. Racial (blackwhite) segregation in the workplace is of a similar magnitude to education segregation (14%), and ethnic (Hispanic-white) segregation is somewhat higher (20%). Only a tiny portion (3%) of racial segregation in the workplace is driven by education differences between blacks and whites, but a substantial fraction of ethnic segregation in the workplace (32%) can be attributed to differences in language proficiency. Finally, additional evidence suggests that segregation by language likely reflects complementarity among workers speaking the same language.
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Access to Financial Capital Among U.S. Businesses: The Case of African-American Firms
December 2006
Working Paper Number:
CES-06-33
The differences between African-American business ownership rates and white business ownership rates are striking. Estimates from the 2000 Census indicate that 11.8 percent of white workers are self-employed business owners, compared with only 4.8 percent of black workers. Furthermore, black-white differences in business ownership rates have remained roughly constant over most of the twentieth century (Fairlie and Meyer 2000). In addition to lower rates of business ownership, black-owned businesses are less successful on average than are white or Asian firms. In particular, black-owned businesses have lower sales, hire fewer employees and have smaller payrolls than white- or Asian-owned businesses, on average (U.S. Census Bureau 2001, U.S. Small Business Administration 2001). Black firms also have lower profits and higher closure rates than white firms (U.S. Census Bureau 1997, U.S. Small Business Administration 1999). For most outcomes, the disparities are extremely large. For example, estimates from the 2002 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) indicate that white firms have average sales of $437,870 compared with only $74,018 for black firms.
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Why Are Black-Owned Businesses Less Successful than White-Owned Businesses? The Role of Families, Inheritances, and Business Human Capital
June 2005
Working Paper Number:
CES-05-06
Four decades ago, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan made the argument that the black family "was not strong enough to create those extended clans that elsewhere were most helpful for businessmen and professionals." Using data from the confidential and restricted access Characteristics of Business Owners Survey, we investigate this hypothesis by examining whether racial differences in family business backgrounds can explain why black-owned businesses lag substantially behind white-owned businesses in sales, profits, employment size and survival probabilities? Estimates from the CBO indicate that black business owners have a relatively disadvantaged family business background compared with white business owners. Black business owners are much less likely than white business owners to have had a self-employed family member owner prior to starting their business and are less likely to have worked in that family member's business. We do not, however, find sizeable racial differences in inheritances of business. Using a nonlinear decomposition technique, we find that the relatively low probability of having a self-employed family member prior to business startup among blacks does not generally contribute to racial differences in small business outcomes. Instead, the lack of prior work experience in a family business among black business owners, perhaps by limiting their acquisition of general and specific business human capital, negatively affects black business outcomes. We also find that limited opportunities for acquiring specific business human capital through work experience in businesses providing similar goods and services contribute to worse business outcomes among blacks. We compare these estimates to contributions from racial differences in owner's education, startup capital, geographical location and other factors.
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