To the extent that mismatch is important, closing racial and ethnic gaps in employment and earnings requires improving the access of spatially-isolated minority workers to the full set of employment opportunities within regional economies. Improving accessibility can be accomplished through some combination of community development, residential mobility, and transportation programs. 2 Among the latter set of options, a potential tool for enhancing accessibility would be to increase auto access for racial and ethnic minorities. Racial differences in car-ownership rates are large, comparable in magnitude to the black-white difference in home-ownership rates documented by Oliver and Shapiro (1997). .
