Disparate circumstances
Guns and Violence: The Enduring Impact of Crack Cocaine Markets on Young Black Males
William Evans, Craig Garthwaite & Timothy Moore
NBER Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
Crack cocaine markets were associated with substantial increases in violence in the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s. Using cross-city variation in the emergence of these markets, we show that the resulting violence has important long-term implications for understanding current levels of murder rates by age, sex and race. We estimate that the murder rate of young black males doubled soon after crack’s entrance into a city, and that these rates were still 70 percent higher 17 years after crack’s arrival. We document the role of increased gun possession as a mechanism for this increase. Following previous work, we show that the fraction of suicides by firearms is a good proxy for gun availability and that this variable among young black males follows a similar trajectory to murder rates. Access to guns by young black males explains their elevated murder rates today compared to older cohorts. The long run effects of this increase in violence are large. We attribute nearly eight percent of the murders in 2000 to the long-run effects of the emergence of crack markets. Elevated murder rates for younger black males continue through to today and can explain approximately one tenth of the gap in life expectancy between black and white males.
Sorting or Steering: Experimental Evidence on the Economic Effects of Housing Discrimination
Peter Christensen & Christopher Timmins
NBER Working Paper, July 2018
Abstract:
Housing discrimination is illegal. However, paired-tester audit experiments have revealed evidence of discrimination in the interactions between potential buyers and realtors, raising concern about whether certain groups are systematically excluded from the beneficial effects of healthy neighborhoods. Using data from HUD's most recent Housing Discrimination Study and micro-level data on key attributes of neighborhoods in 28 US cities, we find strong evidence of discrimination in the characteristics of neighborhoods towards which individuals are steered. Conditional upon the characteristics of the house suggested by the audit tester, minorities are significantly more likely to be steered towards neighborhoods with less economic opportunity and greater exposures to crime and local pollutants. We find that holding locational preferences or income constant, discriminatory steering alone may contribute substantially to the disproportionate number of minority households found in high poverty neighborhoods in the United States. The steering effect is also large enough to fully explain the differential in proximity to Superfund sites among African American mothers. These results have important implications for studies of “neighborhood effects” and confirm an important mechanism underlying observed correlations between race and pollution in the environmental justice literature. Our results also suggest that the basic utility maximization assumptions underlying hedonic and residential sorting models may often be violated, resulting in an important distortion in the provision of local public goods.
Places of Persistence: Slavery and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States
Thor Berger
Demography, August 2018, Pages 1547–1565
Abstract:
Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility — family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital — can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.
Torn Apart? The Impact of Manufacturing Employment Decline on Black and White Americans
Eric Gould
Hebrew University of Jerusalem Working Paper, June 2018
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of manufacturing employment decline on the socio-economic outcomes within and between black and white Americans from 1960 to 2010. Exploiting variation across cities and over time, the analysis shows that manufacturing decline negatively impacted blacks (men, women, and children) in terms of their wages, employment, marriage rates, house values, poverty rates, death rates, single parenthood, teen motherhood, child poverty, and child mortality. In addition, the decline in manufacturing increased inequality within the black community in terms of overall wages and the gaps between education groups in wages, employment, and marriage rates. Many of the same patterns are found for whites, but to a lesser degree – leading to larger gaps between whites and blacks in wages, marriage patterns, poverty, single-parenthood, and death rates. The results are robust to the inclusion or exclusion of several control variables, and the use of a "shift-share" instrument for the local manufacturing employment share. Overall, the decline in manufacturing is reducing socio-economic conditions in general while increasing inequality within and between racial groups – which is consistent with a stronger general equilibrium effect of the loss of highly-paid, lower-skilled jobs on the less-educated segments of the population.
The Racial Position of European Immigrants 1883–1941: Evidence from Lynching in the Midwest
David Rigby & Charles Seguin
Social Currents, forthcoming
Abstract:
The racial position of European immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries vis-à-vis blacks and whites is debated. Some argue that many European immigrant groups were initially considered nonwhite, while others argue that they were almost always considered white, if sometimes still from a distinct intrawhite racial category. Using a new dataset of all lynchings in the American Midwest from 1883 to 1941, we explore differences in collective violence enacted upon three groups: native-born whites, blacks, and European immigrants. We find that European immigrants were lynched in ways, and at rates, much more similar to that of native whites than to those of blacks. Blacks in the Midwest were lynched at roughly 30 times the rate of native-born whites and European immigrants, and were sometimes ritually burned in massive “spectacle lynchings” while native whites and European immigrants were never burned. We find suggestive evidence that European immigrants were perceived to have posed threats to the political order. Our results suggest that, in the American Midwest, despite nativist othering, European immigrants were fully on the white side of the color line, and were protected from collective violence by their white status.
Prevalence and Patterning of Mental Disorder in Three Cohorts of Black and White Americans Through Adolescence
Patricia Louie & Blair Wheaton
American Journal of Epidemiology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The tendency for Blacks to report similar or lower rates of mental disorder than Whites is well-established. However, whether these disparities are stable across cohorts of Black and White Americans is not well understood. In the current study, we examined Black-White differences in the lifetime prevalence of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition mood, anxiety, impulse control, substance use and any disorders across 3 cohorts of Blacks and Whites aged 4 to 18. Using merged data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (2001-2003) and the National Comorbidity Survey Adolescent Supplement (2001-2004), we observed a change in the Black-White patterning of mental disorder between 1957 and 2004. Blacks born between 1957-1969 reported lower rates of anxiety disorders relative to their White counterparts (odds ratio (OR)=0.69, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.52-0.91), Blacks born between 1970-1982 reported no difference in the rates of anxiety disorders relative to Whites (OR=0.97, 95% CI: 0.76-1.25), and Blacks born between 1983-1991 reported higher rates of anxiety disorders relative to Whites (OR=1.30, 95% CI: 1.18-1.43). Similar but less distinct trends were observed for mood, impulse control, and any disorders. Our results suggest that the Black-White patterning of mental disorder has changed across cohorts, to the disadvantage of Black Americans.
Racial Divisions and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Southern State Courts
Benjamin Feigenberg & Conrad Miller
NBER Working Paper, June 2018
Abstract:
The US criminal justice system is exceptionally punitive. We test whether racial heterogeneity is one cause, exploiting cross-jurisdiction variation in criminal justice practices in four Southern states. We estimate the causal effect of jurisdiction on initial charge outcome, validating our estimates using a quasi-experimental research design based on defendants that are charged in multiple jurisdictions. Consistent with a simple model of ingroup bias in electorate preferences, the relationship between local punitiveness and the black share of defendants follows an inverted U-shape. Heterogeneous jurisdictions are more punitive for both black and white defendants. By contrast, punishment norms are unrelated to local crime rates. Simulation results suggest that adopting the punishment norms of homogeneous jurisdictions would decrease the share of charges leading to an incarceration sentence and the black-white gap in this share by 16-19%.
Can Wealth Explain Neighborhood Sorting by Race and Income?
Dionissi Aliprantis, Daniel Carroll & Eric Young
Federal Reserve Working Paper, June 2018
Abstract:
Why do high-income blacks live in neighborhoods with characteristics similar to those of low-income whites? One plausible explanation is wealth, since homeownership requires some wealth, and black households hold less wealth than white households at all levels of income. We present evidence against this hypothesis by showing that wealth does not predict sorting into neighborhood quality once race and income are taken into account. An alternative explanation is that the scarcity of high-quality black neighborhoods increases the cost of living in a high-quality neighborhood for black households with even weak race preferences. We present evidence in favor of this hypothesis by showing that sorting into neighborhood racial composition is similar across wealth levels conditional on race and income.
Consistency and Compensation in Mercy: Commutation in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Veronica Horowitz & Christopher Uggen
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This multi-method paper presents a model of individual and contextual variation in commutation, a form of clemency that lessens the severity of criminal sentences. In the contemporary US context of high incarceration, commutation is one of few “back-end” mechanisms available for early release. We first describe national trends, showing a significant decline in commutation releases, as well as great geographic variation. We then test whether commutation decisions reflect consistency or compensation with other forms of punishment. Our mixed-effects logit analysis reveals state-level compensation (greater commutation in more punitive states) but individual-level consistency (greater commutation for more advantaged groups). Commutation is most likely for those presenting a “mercy package” of White race, female sex, and less violent criminal histories. In contrast, Black men convicted of violence are exceedingly unlikely to be commuted. Nevertheless, qualitative evidence suggests that the apparent “female advantage” in commutation may reflect differences in the nature of the underlying offense and subsequent prison behavior. These results both parallel and extend sociological research on punishment, pointing to commutation as an understudied and underutilized mechanism for mercy.
The effects of school desegregation on infant health
Menghan Shen
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines the effects of school desegregation on infant health using birth certificate data from 1970 to 2002 and a multiple difference-in-differences approach that exploits variation in the timing of desegregation across counties. Using cohort fixed effects and county fixed effects, I find that among black mothers in Southern regions, school desegregation reduces preterm births by 1.7 percentage points. These results are robust to county-specific cohort trends, county-specific year trends, and state-specific cohort fixed effects. In addition, school desegregation increases maternal education and prenatal care in the first trimester and decreases the likelihood of the child having a teenage father. These may be important pathways to improved infant health. This paper adds to the growing literature on the importance of school desegregation in areas beyond academic achievement.
When Work Moves: Job Suburbanization and Black Employment
Conrad Miller
NBER Working Paper, June 2018
Abstract:
This paper presents evidence that job suburbanization caused significant declines in black employment from 1970 to 2000. I document that, conditional on detailed job characteristics, blacks are less likely than whites to work in suburban establishments, and this spatial segregation is stable over time despite widespread decentralization of population and jobs. This stable segregation suggests job suburbanization may have increased black-white labor market inequality. Exploiting variation across metropolitan areas, I find that job suburbanization is associated with substantial declines in black employment rates relative to white employment rates. Evidence from nationally planned highway infrastructure corroborates a causal interpretation.
Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland
Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick & Grant Graziani
NBER Working Paper, June 2018
Abstract:
We study the effect of diversity in the physician workforce on the demand for preventive care among African-American men. Black men have the lowest life expectancy of any major demographic group in the U.S., and much of the disadvantage is due to chronic diseases which are amenable to primary and secondary prevention. In a field experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors and to incentives for one of the five offered preventives — the flu vaccine. We use a two-stage design, measuring decisions about cardiovascular screening and the flu vaccine before (ex ante) and after (ex post) meeting their assigned doctor. Black men select a similar number of preventives in the ex-ante stage, but are much more likely to select every preventive service, particularly invasive services, once meeting with a doctor who is the same race. The effects are most pronounced for men who mistrust the medical system and for those who experienced greater hassle costs associated with their visit. Subjects are more likely to talk with a black doctor about their health problems and black doctors are more likely to write additional notes about the subjects. The results are most consistent with better patient-doctor communication during the encounter rather than differential quality of doctors or discrimination. Our findings suggest black doctors could help reduce cardiovascular mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 per year — leading to a 19% reduction in the black-white male gap in cardiovascular mortality.