Explaining the Racial Unemployment Gap: Race, Region, and the Employment Status of Men, 1940

Abstract

Although the substantial and persistent gap between the unemployment rates of African-Americans and whites in the United States first emerged in aggregate statistics covering the 1940s and 1950s, disaggregation reveals that the gap already existed in urban areas before 1940. Using individual-level data on male workers from the 1940 Census, the author analyzes the causes of the unemployment gap. He finds that racial differences in measured human capital and other characteristics can explain all of the racial gap in the South but less than half of the gap in the North. This result contrasts with results from studies of wages, which have found a larger racial residual in the South than in the North.