The Relationship Among African American Male Earnings, Employment, Incarceration and Immigration: A Time Series Approach

The advent of rising immigration has spurred research into a number of important issues insofar as the indigenous labor market is concerned. Some of these issues regarding the nature of the effect on native workers have been studied extensively. Others, like the interrelationships among immigration flows, African-American male earnings, employment, and incarceration rates have not been widely examined. In this paper, the association among these non-stationary variables is studied in the framework of a Vector Error Correction model and the associated cointegrating relationship. We find no statistically significant association among immigration, Black male employment rates, and Black male incarceration rates over the period 1962-2006, ceteris paribus.