Minority Status and Labor Market Outcomes : Does India Have Minority Enclaves?

This paper uses data from the 61st Round
of the National Sample Survey to understand the employment
outcomes of Dalit and Muslim men in India. It uses a
conceptual framework developed for the US labor market that
states that ethnic minorities skirt discrimination in the
primary labor market to build successful self-employed
ventures in the form of ethnic enclaves or ethnic labor
markets. The paper uses entry into self-employment for
educated minority groups as a proxy for minority enclaves.
Based on multinomial logistic regression, the analysis finds
that the minority enclave hypothesis does not hold for
Dalits but it does overwhelmingly for Muslims. The
interaction of Dalit and Muslim status with post-primary
education in urban areas demonstrates that post-primary
education confers almost a disadvantage for minority men: it
does not seem to affect their allocation either to salaried
work or to non-farm self-employment but does increase their
likelihood of opting out of the labor force - and if they
cannot afford to drop out, they join the casual labor
market. Due to the complexity of these results and the fact
that there are no earnings data for self-employment, it is
difficult to say whether self-employment is a choice or
compulsion and whether builders of minority enclaves fare
better than those in the primary market.