John F. Kain
School of Social Sciences
The University of Texas at Dallas

POSITION STATEMENT

While I have done some work in regional economics and its implications for inequality and equity, the larger part of my research relating to the spatial dimensions of inequality and equity has been in three areas. The first has been research on housing market discrimination, the causes of high levels of racial, particularly black-white segregation, residential segregation and their contributions to high levels of unemployment and low earnings of African Americans. My (1965 and 1968) papers on what has come to be termed spatial mismatch were the first to provide systematic evidence that housing market segregation affected the geographic location of black employment and lowered black employment levels. The controversy and the extensive body of research spawned by my two original articles is reviewed in Kain (1992).

John Quigley�s and my book, Housing Markets and Racial Discrimination: A Micro-economic Analysis, and earlier paper provided support for the widely contested view that housing market discrimination and segregation caused blacks to pay more than whites for comparable housing and limited the range of housing and residential opportunities available to them (Kain and Quigley 1972 and 1975). Perhaps the most important finding of this line of research were results demonstrating that housing market discrimination greatly reduced black access to home ownership, an outcome that increased their housing costs, and perhaps of even greater importance, was responsible for a large part of the gap in black and white wealth accumulation.

A third focus of my research over more than a decade was efforts to construct computer simulation models of urban housing markets (Ingram, Kain and Ginn 1972 and Kain and Apgar 1985). The resulting models, which were used to assess both housing allowances and neighborhood improvement programs, emphasized the role of specific workplace locations on household demand for both housing and residential locations. These models also explicitly represented the ways in which housing market discrimination/segregation affected the housing and residential choices of black households and their impacts on housing investment and neighborhood quality.

For the past decade my energies have been devoted to a large-scale research project on Texas public schools. The initial focus of this research was on the impacts of minority, principally black suburbanization, on the achievement of individual black children. Kain and O�Brien (2000) find that blacks attending higher quality suburban schools score significantly higher on standardized tests than otherwise identical blacks who attend lower quality inner city schools. Research on the determinants of individual achievement remains a focus of our research, but during the past two years we have increasingly been concerned with minority access to Texas public colleges and universities. A description of the UTD Texas Schools Project and a dozen or so working papers are available on the Green Center website, www.utdallas.edu/research/greenctr.

The UTD Texas Schools Project has developed an extensive an ambitious micro database, The Texas Schools Microdata Panel (TSMP) for use in its research. Phase I of this database consisted of up to 10 years of individual data for five panels of Texas public school students and their teachers. The database included enrollment and attendance data for all students in these cohorts as well as their standardized tests. As long as these individuals attended any of the more than 6,000 public schools in Texas we were able to follow them. This feature of the panel and large samples sizes (more than 250,000 students per cohort) enabled us to examine a large number of issues that heretofore could not be studied effectively.

About two years ago a large grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to study minority access to public colleges and universities in Texas made it necessary for us to add six cohorts of older students to TSMP as well as data on all students that were enrolled in any Texas college or university between 1990 and 2001. The public school data obtained for the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the higher education data obtained from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) have common encrypted IDs, a feature that enables us to link the two data sources. We had always intended to obtain the THECB data for our original five cohorts. The Mellon grant forced us to accelerate our timetable. We have also asked the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) to provide us with earnings data for individual Texas residents for the same period, again with the same encrypted ID so that we can link them to the TEA and THECB data. We are still waiting for a response.

Early this year, Rick Hanushek, Steve Rivkin and I obtained a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation to use TSMP to study charter schools. To complete this work we had to add younger cohorts to TSMP. When data collection for both the Mellon and Smith Richardson studies have been completed TSMP will include individual data for all individuals to attended a Texas public school or Texas public college or university from 1990 to 2001. TSMP will then include individual data for more than 10 million persons. We hope, moreover, that TWC will agree to provide the earnings data we have requested in a form that will allow us to link them to the TEA and THECB data. A more extensive discussion of TSMP and the Mellon and Smith Richardson grants is available at: www.utdallas.edu/research/greenctr.

References

Kain, John F. 1965. "The Effect of the Ghetto on the Distribution and Level of Nonwhite Employment in Urban Areas," American Statistical Association, Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section, Washington, DC: 260-271.

Kain, John F. 1968. "Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization," Quarterly Journal of Economics LXXXII, No. 2 (May): 175-197.

Kain, John F. and Joseph J. Persky. 1969. "Alternatives to the Gilded Ghetto," The Public Interest (Winter).

Kain, John F. and John M. Quigley. 1972. "Housing Market Discrimination, Homeownership, and Savings Behavior," American Economic Review (June).

Ingram, Gregory K., John F. Kain and J. Royce Ginn. 1972. The Detroit Prototype of the NBER Urban Simulation Model. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kain, John F. and John M. Quigley. 1975. Housing Markets and Racial Discrimination: A Micro-Economic Analysis. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kain, John F. and William C. Apgar, Jr. 1985. Housing and Neighborhood Dynamics: A Simulation Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kain, John F. 1992. "The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Three Decades Later," Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 3, Issue 2: 371-460.

Kain, John F. and Daniel M. O�Brien. 2000. "Black Suburbanization in Texas Metropolitan Areas and Its Impact on Student Achievement," (March 9). UTD Texas Schools Project Working Paper, The Cecil and Ida Green Center for the Study of Science and Society, The University of Texas at Dallas