The Economics of Residential and Workplace Segregation

Judith Hellerstein is using data from the 1990 and 2000 DEED datasets to evaluate the relationship of residential location to workplace segregation, under an NIH R01 grant which will wrap up in Spring 2009. The Decennial Employer-Employee Databases, which Hellerstein and her colleagues developed, match employee information from the census long form to employers. She and her colleagues have published three papers based on this research to date.

“Workplace Segregation in the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Skill" confirms a "significant amount" of racial and ethnic segregation but finds that "very little of racial segregation in the workplace is driven by (the measurable) education differences between blacks and whites."

In “Spatial Mismatch:  New Evidence from Census Data Sources” they found that differing employment rates for blacks living in a central urban setting vs. those living in suburbs disappears when population density is taken into consideration, a result which "is in contrast to the standard spatial mismatch story and is more consistent with models of labor market networks or labor market discrimination."

"Production Function and Wage Equation Estimation with Heterogeneous Labor: Evidence from a New Matched Employer-Employee Data Set" used manufacturing data in the 1990 DEED to revisit evidence from previous work. Most significant was "the continued finding of robust evidence that wage gaps between men and women exceed differences in productivity, consistent with models where employers discriminate against women."