Race, space, and unemployment duration

This paper employs a special geo-coded tabulation of the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the link between racial differences in residential location, or residential segregation, and racial disparities in unemployment durations. For a sample of 1098 workers whose employment was terminated during the years 1990 through 1992, we estimate continuous time duration models explaining unemployment durations for recently unemployed individuals as a function of personal and household characteristics affecting worker productivity, residential location characteristics at the time of job termination, and measures of job accessibility. We find that residential segregation affects racial differences in unemployment durations by exacerbating racial differences in job accessibility and neighborhood peer effects.