C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - F O U R A Primer on Spatial Mismatch within Urban Labor Markets INTRODUCTION Taken together, these features raise the obvious question of whether the relatively poor labormarket outcomes of blacks are related to the distances that exist between their homes in the central city and new jobs in the suburbs. | A Companion to Urban Economics Edited by Richard J. Arnott Daniel P. McMillen Copyright 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR A Primer on Spatial Mismatch within Urban Labor Markets Keith R. Ihlanfeldt Introduction There are three features that almost all metropolitan areas in the United States have in common 1 job growth is occurring predominately in the suburbs 2 the black population is concentrated within the central city and 3 employment and earnings are low for blacks in comparison to whites. Taken together these features raise the obvious question of whether the relatively poor labormarket outcomes of blacks are related to the distances that exist between their homes in the central city and new jobs in the suburbs. This question has been formalized within the urban economics literature as the spatial mismatch hypothesis SMH which maintains that the employment opportunities of blacks have been eroded by their inability to follow jobs from the central city to the suburbs as job suburbanization accelerated after World War II. The SMH is one of the most researched issues in urban economics as evidenced by the fact that more than 100 journal articles have been written on the SMH in the past 30 years for reviews of early and more recent studies of the SMH see respectively Kain 1992 Ihlanfeldt Sjoquist 1998 . Despite all of this research urban economists are still highly divided in their opinions on the importance that spatial mismatch plays in explaining economic disparities between the races. The reason for this is that while the question posed by the SMH may be obvious reliable empirical tests of the SMH are notoriously difficult to conduct. Because the importance of spatial mismatch remains an unresolved issue it will continue to be high on urban economists research agendas for the foreseeable future. This is even more Spatial Mismatch within Urban Labor Markets 405 true today than in the past due to recent reforms in the US welfare system .
