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Are black workers missing the connection? The effect of spatial distance and employee referrals on interfirm racial
1Department of Sociology, CB 3210, 155 Hamilton Hall, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210, USA. tedmouw@email.unc.edu
Demography
|September 11, 2002
Abstract:
I use data on the hiring practices and spatial location of firms in four cities to model the process of interfirm racial segregation. When I control for the spatial location of the firm, the use of employee referrals reduced the probability of hiring a black worker by 75% in firms that are less than 10% black. Among all firms, the results suggest that employee referrals are just as important as the geographic location of the firm in generating employment segregation: both increase the predicted level of interfirm racial segregation among blue-collar workers in the cities studied by about 10%.