Spatial effects upon employment outcomes: the case of New Jersey teenagers

Employment and idleness outcomes for a large sample of New Jersey urban youth are analyzed. The analysis is based on observations on at-home youth and their families, the employment access of the neighborhood in which they live and the socioeconomic character of those neighborhoods. The analysis documents the importance of human capital and family attributes in conditioning the labor market outcomes for youth living at home. Evidence is found of substantial spatial linkages to employment outcomes. While not consistently significant across metropolitan areas, measures of access to jobs are important in affecting employment in some areas, especially for minority youth. Access appears to play essentially no role in determining youth idleness, an outcome dominated by youth school-enrollment status. Measures of the presence of employed and non-poor individuals affect youth employment.

Theories about the importance of space in urban labor markets have emphasized the role of employment access, on the one hand, and neighborhood composition, on the other hand, in affecting employment outcomes. This paper presents an empirical analysis which considers both of these factors, together with individual human capital characteristics and household attributes in affecting youth employment. The analysis is based upon an unusually rich sample of micro data on youth in four New Jersey metropolitan areas. The empirical analysis is based on a sample of some 18,000 at home youth, matched to detailed census tract demographic information and specially constructed measures of employment access. The research includes a comparison of the importance of neighborhood access in affecting youth employment when individual and household attributes are also measured. The results demonstrate the overall importance of these spatial factors (particularly neighborhood composition) in affecting youth employment in urban areas.