Do Black Mayors Improve Black Employment Outcomes? Evidence from Large U.S. 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 black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors both in absolute terms and relative to whites. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture causal effects of black mayors. We also find that by improving the employment outcomes of blacks, black mayors lead to higher black incomes both in absolute terms and 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.