Firm Turnover and the Return of Racial Establishment Segregation

Abstract

Racial segregation between American workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase has happened alongside the declines in within-establishment occupational segregation on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between-establishment and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more-and less-homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses intently on within-firm processes. By doing so, we may be overstating what progress has been made on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.

Organizations as the building blocks of social inequalities

“…But these processes can similarly be seen by tracking a population of organizations and connecting inequality regimes to the birth and death of organizations in that population. Ferguson and Koning (2018) find that increasing racial segregation in US employment is driven primarily by the heightened segregation between firms, and this is driven by the death of more integrated firms and the birth of less integrated ones. Thus, the population of organizations as they interact with national political economic environments should also be attended to in understanding the dynamics of organizational inequalities.…”

The Persistent Effect of Temporary Affirmative Action

“…I assess whether the size-black share relationship is of opposite sign for black-run businesses. I estimate models of the form (6) black…”

“…Her combined estimates for black men and women imply that regulation generates an immediate level increase of less than 0.1 percentage points in the black share of a firm's employees, that this effect is roughly unchanged two years after a firm transitions to non-contractor, and that the initial impact of the regulation completely dissipates as early as four years after a firm gains contractor status. 6 Kurtulus (2016) is the first to consider the potentially dynamic effects of the regulation on employment, an important innovation. 7 Building on this insight, a primary contribution of the present paper is to focus on the dynamic effects of regulation, particularly for temporarily regulated employers, and to consider the implications that persistence may have for identification.…”

A Method for Studying Differences in Segregation Across Time and Space

“…For instance, in the school segregation literature, there is a debate about the resegregation of schools along racial lines (Reardon and Owens, 2014). The workplace segregation literature documented a decrease in within-workplace racial segregation levels, but a decrease in between-workplace segregation (Ferguson and Koning, 2018). The gender-occupational literature is interested not only in comparing segregation over time within a single country, but also across regional or national economies (e.g., Charles and Grusky, 2004).…”

“…While this seems a natural question, it has only received scant attention in the segregation literature. An exception is Ferguson and Koning (2018), who studied the effect of firm turnover on workplace segregation.…”