ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relative importance of the movement of jobs from central cities to suburbs and race as explanations of minority youth’s employment problems. According to John Kain the spatial mismatch hypothesis suggests that job decentralization negatively affects the economic welfare of blacks more than whites because of the role that residential segregation plays in limiting blacks’ ability to follow jobs to the suburbs. The chapter suggests that race is also an important background characteristic that employers consider in the hiring of workers as well. If employers are uncertain about the potential training costs of workers, about whose background characteristics they are uncertain as well, they will likely look more critically at indicators of trainability. The spatial mismatch between the location of jobs and the residences of blacks, and to a lesser extent Latinos, is a compelling explanation of racial differences in unemployment because of the extent to which jobs have moved from central cities to the suburbs.
