Do Black Mayors Improve Black Employment Outcomes? Evidence from Large U.S. Cities
John Nye, Thomas Stratmann, Ilia Rainer | May 09, 2011
I was worried about endogeneity, but since they only looked at instances where the race of the mayor changed, it may work. I would still worry that the effect is a short-run "Kroog": taking money from citizens who ALREADY work, and paying unemployed people for fake jobs working for government, is not really growth. Yes, that's all lefty shills like Krugman care about, but not clear the effect is anything but transitory.
ATSRTWT
To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities’ mayors between 1971 and 2003. We find that black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors both in absolute terms and relative to whites. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture the causal effects of black mayors. We also find that the effect of black mayors on black employment outcomes is stronger in cities that have a large black community. This suggests that electoral incentives may be an important determinant of racial favoritism. Finally, we also find that, corresponding to increases in employment, black income is higher after black mayors take office. Again, this effect is pronounced in cities with a large black population.
2 comments:
Read the abstract again, swapping the words black and white. Seems pernicious that way.
This isn't directly relevant, but here's a recent article about mayors:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2010.00499.x/abstract
Abstract:
U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel dataset combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or an Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.
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