Newly published research from Max Buchholz tracks racial disparities in urban economic mobility
New research from Assistant Professor of City & Regional Planning Max Buchholz suggests that large cities, with their high cost of living and large populations, may create strong barriers to Black and Latinx workers accessing good jobs with high levels of upward mobility, as compared to white workers. This research is part of Buchholz’s ongoing investigations into the causes of urban inequality.
The research article, “Black and Latinx Workers Reap Lower Rewards than White Workers from Years Spent Working in Big Cities,” is co-authored with Michael Storper (UCLA and London School of Economics) and published in PNAS, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (vol. 122, no. 6).
The paper is based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort and focuses on the years 1994 to 2018.
Buchholz explains, “While we know big city-regions provide huge opportunities for workers to climb up the income ladder through a greater number and diversity of jobs, our research shows that this benefit largely accrues to white workers. Moreover, it’s not just in big cities; we find even stronger effects in cities with high cost-of-living, suggesting that large populations and high costs come together to create particularly potent barriers to Black and Latinx workers’ access to jobs with high income mobility..”
A primary reason for this racial disparity, Buchholz and Storper found, is that white workers have benefitted to a much greater extent from the high-wage, high-mobility occupations that have concentrated in the biggest cities in recent years.
“Reducing racial economic inequality in big cities may require both equalizing initial access to education and to highly rewarded occupations, as well as rewarding career-long work experience equally,” the authors conclude.