Racial Inequality and the Spatial Organization of Employers in the U.S.

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to examine how urban spatial structure, including the patterning and location of a city's residents and its jobs, affects racial inequality in the labor market. One key mechanism through which this happens is spatial mismatch. Research on spatial mismatch has been both voluminous and inconclusive, with broadly mixed results across a wide range of particular contexts and research designs. One important reason for this is that the bulk of studies exploring spatial mismatch have been cross-sectional and limited to narrow geographic contexts (typically single-city studies). This broad variation in context and method makes it unsurprising that this body of research has not produced a consistent set of findings. In this dissertation, I use novel data on private employers that covers that full U.S. in the period 1971--2011 to explore the effects of spatial mismatch across a range of geographic contexts, over time, for different groups, and using different methods to build a comprehensive picture of how the spatial organization of labor markets interacts with racially patterned housing to produce inequality in the labor market and beyond.