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We investigate how wages and occupation sorting vary by race, gender, and class during recessions. We performed repeated Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions of the Black-White wage gap from 1988 to 2020. Black professional-class workers’ wages are more unstable and take a more substantial hit during recessions. Black workers see a lower return to their labor market characteristics during recessions, and this is pronounced for the professional class. Using an occupational crowding methodology, we find that Black women are overrepresented in essential work and roles with high physical proximity to others and receive the lowest wages. White men are crowded out of riskier work but, within these categories, dominate higher-paying roles. Black workers earn less in professional riskier work than in working-class roles, while the reverse is true for White workers. We find that class status does not protect Black workers to the same extent as White workers, especially during recessions.

Social scientists from a range of disciplines have provided evidence of a connection between unemployment and mental health. However, researchers recognize that poor mental health can lead to joblessness, highlighting the challenge of generating an accurate estimate of the impact of unemployment on mental health. In addition, virtually all of these studies use either self-reported measures of mental health or broad measures of emotional well-being such as self-esteem or constructs of general emotional health which are less than ideal. A shortcoming in the literature is that scholars have yet to examine whether race effects the extent of the effect of unemployment on psychological distress. Unemployment might have a smaller impact on blacks, because they have a higher degree of resilience due to encountering a greater and more intense array of life challenges, or a larger impact because of the fear of the consequences of unemployment due to structural discrimination and fewer buffers such as wealth. This paper uses measures of mental health based on the DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnostic manuals to offer estimates of the link between unemployment and psychological distress for whites and blacks. We directly consider the prior mental health background of individuals to address the problem of reverse causality bias that mars virtually all existing estimates of the link between mental health and unemployment. This also allows us to offer convincing evidence on the relative effect of unemployment on mental health across racial groups. The analysis uses data from the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication. We construct two subsamples, one composed of those with no previous identified bouts of poor mental health (resilient) and a second group containing individuals with a history of psychological distress (vulnerable). Resilient persons, relative to those with a history of suffering from psychological distress, should be less likely to suffer a bout of poor mental health leading to unemployment. In addition, the influence of other covariates is likely different for resilient versus vulnerable individuals. Thus, our contention is that estimates generated using the resilient subsample will be less prone to suffer from reverse causality bias, measurement error, and specification bias. Hence, these estimates will provide the most accurate gauge of the mental costs of unemployment across racial groups. Our findings reveal that among resilient persons the pernicious effect of short-term unemployment on psychological distress is significantly greater for blacks. Our findings, based on data from the recession that began in 2001, allow us to infer that the Great Recession had a more intense adverse mental health effect on members of the black community. Our results imply that policymakers should consider both the monetary and psychological costs of unemployment, as well as their racial implications, when formulating policy to address the effects of economic downturns.

A growing body of research documents that middle income households are increasingly facing a higher prevalence of economic insecurity in relatives. We hypothesize that wealth accumulation will be greatly weakened for middle income households with proximity to a larger kin network of economic hardship. We focus on multiple generations and generational peers because they are members of the same family tree, yet they have grown up in different public policy regimes. Using panel data, we find that, compared to their white counterparts, third generation middle income black families are disproportionately exposed to relatives (siblings, cousins, parents, grandparents) that face poverty, unemployment, and wealth disparity. A decomposition of the wealth disparity reveals that economic insecurity in the family tree is one of the largest contributors to the black-white wealth gap among middle income earners in the third generation.

New data collected for the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area provide detailed information on financial assets that allow analysis to extend beyond the traditional black–white divide. Targeting US-born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and other Hispanics, findings from the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color survey underscore the large racial and ethnic disparities in financial wealth, even after controlling for demographic and socioeconomic status. Further, some notable differences between Boston’s communities of color highlight the importance of detailed analyses for research on the racial wealth gap. In particular, among non-white communities Dominicans report comparatively low asset and high debt amounts, while Caribbean blacks report relatively higher levels of wealth. Altogether, these findings point to the need for wealth building opportunities in communities of color and further investigation of the causes and consequences of financial disparities between groups of color disaggregated by specific ancestral origin.

The inter-racial marriage gap that opened in the past 50 years is generally attributed to a decline in the availability of young black marriageable men. We contend that the associated shortage of desirable men in the marriage market provides those black men who are sought after with the opportunity to attain a high status spouse, which has placed a premium on black women with lighter skin. We provide evidence, based on data drawn from the Multi City Study of Urban Inequality, consistent with this hypothesis. Our theoretical analysis of the marriage market reveals that marriage promotion policies to increase the desire to marry on the part of young black women will serve to exacerbate the importance attached to skin shade.

Scholars have found that poor English proficiency is negatively associated with wages using self-reported measures. However, these estimates may suffer from misclassification bias. Interviewer ratings are likely to more accurately proxy employer assessment of worker language ability. Using self-reported and interviewer ratings from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, the authors estimate the impact of English proficiency on wages for men ( n = 267) and women ( n = 178) with Mexican ancestry residing in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Use of interviewer proficiency ratings suggests a larger and more gradational language penalty as fluency falls, and women face a stronger penalty than their male counterparts. Moreover, controlling for worker accent and skin shade does little to alter these effects.

The 1990s witnessed significant changes in home ownership policy that were designed to reduce disparities in home ownership rates between whites and non‐whites. The study finds evidence that the policies were, indeed, effective in reducing home ownership disparities between whites and non‐whites. In this study data from the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS) are used to examine ethnic/racial home ownership rate disparities. Decompositions are performed to determine the component of home ownership rate differentials due to ethnic/racial group characteristics versus ability to translate those characteristics into home ownership. Presumably, a shift in public policy to be more ethnically and racially inclusive should reflect a change in home ownership rate disparities and, more particularly, a change in the component of those disparities attributed to differential ability to translate group characteristics into home ownership rates. Hence, this study addresses the success of recent policies to...

The widening wealth gap in the United States is a worrisome sign that millions of families nationwide do not have enough in assets to offer better opportunities for future generations. Wealth allows families to make investments in homes, in education, and in business creation. On the basis of data collected using the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey, we report that, when analyzed by race, wealth accumulation is vastly unequal. By means of the NASCC survey, researchers have collected, for the first time, detailed data on assets and debts among subpopulations, according to race, ethnicity, and country of origin — granular detail ordinarily unavailable in public datasets. In this analysis we focus on estimates for U.S. born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Cape Verdeans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Our analysis shows that with respect to types and size of assets and debt held, the data collected on white households and nonwhite households exhibit large differences. The result is that the net worth of whites as compared with nonwhites is staggeringly divergent.

Homeownership disparities between blacks and whites have been a persistent feature of American life. For example, in 1950 the black homeownership rate stood at 63 percent of the total homeownership rate, and nearly a half century later, in 1996, the black homeownership rate stood at 67 percent of the national homeownership rate (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001a). Although there may not be consensus among social scientists that housing discrimination continues to play a role in racial homeownership disparities, a vast majority of social scientists would not dispute the historical role of housing discrimination, and during the late 1980’s and 1990’s policymakers acted under the implicit assumption that discrimination was a driving force behind the black–white disparities in homeownership. This paper seeks to explore how policies of the 1990’s that were designed, in part, to combat mortgage lending discrimination affected black–white homeownership disparities in New York City (NYC). Because of its large presence of immigrants, concentrating on NYC allows us to decipher the effects of nativity on homeownership. Moreover, the U.S. Bureau of the Census (2001c) conducted the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS) of approximately 18,000 units in 1991, 1993, 1996, and 1999, which conveniently allows us to track homeownership trends over the 1990’s.