tailieunhanh - Can Boosting Minority Car-Ownership Rates Narrow Inter-Racial Employment Gaps?

Moreover, the residential location choices of low-skilled workers are likely to be geographically constrained by zoning restrictions limiting the location and quantity of low-income housing. Such constraints may limit the ability of low-skilled workers to choose residential locations within reasonable public-transit commutes of important employment centers. In light of these considerations, it is not surprising that researchers have found large differences in employment rates between car-owners and non car-owners. . | Can Boosting Minority Car-Ownership Rates Narrow Inter-Racial Employment Gaps Steven Raphael Goldman School of Public Policy University of California Berkeley raphael@ Michael Stoll School of Public Policy and Social Research University of California Los Angeles mstoll@ June 2000 This research is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation SBR-9709197 and a Small Grant from the Joint Center for Poverty Research. Abstract In this paper we assess whether boosting minority car-ownership rates would narrow inter-racial employment rate differentials. We pursue two empirical strategies. First we explore whether the effect of auto ownership on the probability of being employed is greater for more segregated groups of workers. Exploiting the fact that African-Americans are considerably more segregated from whites than are Latinos we estimate car-employment effects for blacks Latinos and whites and test whether these effects are largest for more segregated groups. Second we use data at the level of the metropolitan area to test whether the car-employment effect for blacks relative to that for whites increases with the degree of black relative isolation from employment opportunities. We find the strongest car effects for blacks followed by Latinos and then whites. Moreover this ordering is statistically significant. We also find that the relative car-employment effect for blacks is largest in metropolitan areas where the relative isolation of blacks from employment opportunities is the most severe. Our empirical estimates indicate that raising minority car-ownership rates to the white car ownership rate would eliminate 45 percent of the black-white employment rate differential and 17 percent of the comparable Latinbo-white differential. 1. Introduction Over the past three decades considerable effort has been devoted to assessing the importance of spatial mismatch in determining racial and ethnic differences in employment outcomes. .