Search

Abstract:This article examines the link between wealth inequality and families’ financial investment, saving, and borrowing for the sake of children. Using the 1998–2016 Survey of Consumer Finances data, we show that American families have increasingly engaged in financially more intensive parenting but that there are substantial differences by wealth and race-ethnicity. Over time, White families above median wealth accumulate more financial assets and education savings as well as less education debt for children. In contrast, Black and Hispanic families across the wealth distribution have low financial assets and education savings for children. In addition, for Black families across the wealth distribution education debt has grown to substantial amounts. These findings suggest that the contemporary norm of intensive parenting has unequal financial manifestations, which have likely contributed to the widening of wealth and racial inequalities, especially between White and Black child households.

Extensive research has investigated the spatial mismatch hypothesis (SMH), considering the consequences of disparities between black residential locations and opportunities for employment. In this study, we argue that the mixed evidence for the SMH may result from a misspecification in both the historical period and the mechanisms whereby spatial mismatch affects black employment. We show that substantial declines in black labor force outcomes occurred in the Jim Crow era, not just the postindustrial era. We then investigate the extent to which the SMH should be formulated as a logistical problem, involving the commuting range of blacks to nonresidential sites of employment, or a problem of transit segregation and residential ecology. Analysis of census microdata between 1910 and 1970 suggests that urban employment suffered when the stigma of segregation prompted black commuters to use restrictive means of transit and when black housing was separated from the homes of business owners or residential employers.

Demographic and ecological theories yield mixed evidence as to whether ethnic enclaves are a benefit or a hindrance to the status attainment of residents and entrepreneurs. This article provides one possible theoretical resolution by separating the positive effects that may emanate among co-ethnic neighbors from the negative effects that may result with the concentration of racial or ethnic groups. The theory is tested by analyzing occupational wage attainment and entrepreneurship among African-Americans between 1880 and 1940, a historical context in which Jim Crow laws imposed segregation exogenously. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel census data for representative samples of blacks in the United States, the results suggest consistent upward occupational mobility among residents with same-race neighbors, accompanied with downward mobility among residents who are concentrated in larger racialized enclaves. Both patterns are also observed in the distribution of entrepreneurial activity among blacks during the Jim Crow era.