This paper examines the importance of job access in explaining labor market outcomes for youth. The work sets forth a broader definition of ‘access’ which emphasizes the information links provided by social networks. Empirical analysis, based upon micro data from the public use sample and upon metropolitan wide aggregates, indicates that employment probabilities for black youth are significantly related to these measures of labor market access.
Written with John M. Quigley.
Since 1970, there has been a large increase in the spatial concentration of American poverty. This increase in concentration of the poor has been largest among the black poor, who are almost four times as likely as the white poor to live in census tracts of extreme poverty. During this same time period, black unemployment has increased, and the ratio of black to white unemployment has also increased.
These facts have focussed attention on the so-called urban ‘underclass’. To economists, the distinguishing feature of this discussion is the alleged importance of concentration effects. Areas of concentrated poverty – which are often characterized by high levels of unemployment, crime, drug use, etc. – may provide an environment which is itself detrimental to residents’ future prospects.
Empirical evidence on the importance of concentrated deprivation per se in affecting social outcomes is quite inconclusive indeed. A detailed examination of this literature, completed in 1987 and recently published by Mayer and Jencks (1989), assesses more than a hundred studies by sociologists and social psychologists, as well as economists, about the effects of ‘neighborhood’ on behavior. This evidence does not permit the authors to conclude with any confidence that neighborhood composition affects educational attainment, cognitive skills, criminality, labor market outcomes, or a variety of other measures of achievement or satisfaction.
This paper provides additional empirical evidence on the role of neighborhood factors in affecting labor market outcomes. The premise underlying the empirical analysis is familiar to economists: namely that access affects the employment opportunities and the employment probabilities of members of the workforce. In most of the analysis which follows, however, we interpret access somewhat more broadly than in the traditional labor and urban economics literature.