Racial Disparities in Job Displacement and Unemployment in the United States

• In Event: 269 - Regular Session. Labor Market

Abstract

This paper offers the first systematic analysis of racial disparities in job displacement in the United States over the past three decades and their relationship to well-known racial disparities in unemployment. I use the CPS’s Displaced Worker Survey, covering displacements from 1979-2011 [expected to be 1979-2013 by the time of the ASA meeting]. Job displacement is an understudied phenomenon within sociology whose importance stems partly from its linking changes in the occupational structure to significant social outcomes, particularly unemployment and downward mobility.

This paper asks three questions. First, what are the racial disparities in job displacement, and how do their levels and trends over time compare to the better-understood racial disparities in unemployment? Second, what is the occupational patterning of racial disparities in job displacement and how has it changed? Third, how do racial disparities in job displacement contribute to racial disparities in unemployment?

Preliminary results show that racial disparities in job displacement are pervasive, but that they were at a historical low throughout the 1990s before increasing across the 2000s (before the Great Recession, and then again during it). This recent growth in the racial disparities in job displacement exists within several cohorts and occupational categories, and contrasts with the secular trend in racial disparities in unemployment. Moreover, the increasing disparities in jobs displacement are concentrated in highly desirable occupations.

Author

• Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, University of Wisconsin-Madison