THE METROPOLITAN STRUCTURE OF SOUTHERN METROPOLITAN AREAS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

This paper systematically analyzes alterations in the employment patterns in 11 different sectors for 1970, 1980, and 1990 for three native-born ethnic groups and four foreign-born subpopulations in New York City. We explicitly contrast two methods of employment-change analysis to unpack the complex urban labor-market process of sectorspecific job succession. Our account builds on Roger Waldinger's recent analysis of shifts in the ethnic division of labor in New York City in the 1970s that used an innovative method of employment change decomposition. Waldinger tested the hypothesis that the upward and outward social movement of native-born whites in the city in this decade created a variegated chain of vacancies that other native-born and immigrant groups differentially filled. This paper expands his analysis to a broader set of ethnicities and explores the extent to which the system of job change altered between the 1970s and 1980s. In doing this, we show how Waldinger's method relates to shift-share analysis—the well-known method of regional employment change analysis. We find support for the theory that a key force behind the recent profound changes in New York's labor market was the redistribution and exit of whites from New York's labor force in the 1970s. In advancing the analysis to understand employment change in the 1980s by ethnic group, we reveal that the role of native whites changed. The native-white exodus from jobs in the city continued but masked sectoral differences in comparative advantage by ethnic category. Immigrant blacks and Hispanics gained jobs in every sector of the economy in the 1970s and in every sector but manufacturing in the 1980s. Immigrant Asians gained jobs in every sector including manufacturing in both decades. Total native-Hispanic employment also increased, but shifted significantly out of manufacturing to advanced services and the public sector in the 1980s. In the 1980s, African Americans lost the competitive advantage they held in the 1970s, largely as a result of significant change in the public sector. FIRE and transportation were the only sectors in which native blacks held labor-market comparative advantage by 1990.