Full Citation

Title: Symptoms Before the Syndrome? Stalled Racial Progress and Japanese Trade in the 1970s and 1980s

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2018

ISBN:

ISSN:

DOI:

NSFID:

PMCID:

PMID:

Abstract: A large recent empirical literature has identified a strong relationship between foreign trade competition from China and a number of economic and social maladies. Decades prior, many of these same maladies became prevalent in black communities, including declining employment, labor force participation and marriage rates, and increases in drug addiction through the crack cocaine epidemic, reversing economic gains made by Black Americans since the Civil Rights Movement. These losses were concurrent with a rapid rise in foreign trade competition from Japan. We assess the impact of this trade competition on racial disparities using variation in commuting zone level exposure. We find that foreign competition from Japan led to a decrease in black manufacturing employment, labor force participation and median incomes, and increases in public assistance recipiency. However we find these losses in manufacturing were offset by increased manufacturing employment among whites. These shifts in the racial composition of employment appear to be caused by skill upgrading in the manufacturing sector. We also find evidence that trade exposure played a role in the suburbanization of manufacturing jobs and the movement of whites out of the urban core.

Url: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~bond10/BatistichBond2018trade.pdf

User Submitted?: No

Authors: Batistich, Mary Kate; Bond, Timothy, N

Publisher: Purdue University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other, Race and Ethnicity

Countries: