Barriers to a better break: Employer discrimination and spatial mismatch in metropolitan Detroit

This article discusses key findings from a survey-based employer study designed to evaluate the relative merit of race, space, and skill-based explanations for growing wage and employment gaps between blacks and whites. The author found that black employers hired a greater percentage of black workers for their firms than white employers matched on the basis of firm size, location, and product produced, but black-owned firms paid lower wages, even though there seemed to be no major differences in skills required for the jobs studied. However, suburban black-owned firms, as well as white-owned firms with strongly enforced anti-discrimination programs, hired much higher percentages of black workers than white-owned firms that did not have such programs. The author presents the findings of disparate wages paid to workers in black- and white-owned firms in the context of the spatial mismatch literature.