Do Black Mayors Improve Black Relative to White Employment Outcomes? Evidence from Large US Cities

Abstract

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 1973 and 2004. We find that relative to whites, black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture causal effects of black mayors. Black mayors also lead to higher black incomes relative to white incomes. We show that our results continue to hold when we compare the treated cities to alternative control groups of cities, explicitly control for changing attitudes towards blacks or use regression discontinuity analysis to compare cities that elected black and white mayors in close elections. (JEL D7, H7, J7)