UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Public transit and the spatial distribution of minority employment: Evidence from a natural experiment Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n2766kx Journal Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 22(3) ISSN 0276-8739 Authors Holzer, H J Quigley, John M. Raphael, S Publication Date 2003 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California August 2002 Public Transit and the Spatial Distribution of Minority Employment: Evidence from a Natural Experiment Harry J. Holzer Public Policy Institute Georgetown University
[email protected] John M. Quigley Department of Economics and Goldman School of Public Policy University of California, Berkeley
[email protected] Steven Raphael Goldman School of Public Policy University of California, Berkeley
[email protected] We thank Eugene Smolensky and Michael Stoll for their very helpful comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the University of California Transportation Center, the Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Science Foundation (grant SBR-9709197). Abstract A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area’s heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner-city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two-wave longitudinal survey of firms, with the first wave of interviews conducted immediately prior to the opening of service and the second wave approximately a year later. We compare within-firm changes in the propensity to hire minority workers for firms located near the station to those located further away, and we also estimate the effect of employer distance to the new stations on changes in propensity to hire minorities.