Blacks in the United States are poorer than whites and have much lower employment rates. "Place-based" policies seek to improve the labor markets in which blacks - especially low-income urban blacks - tend to reside. We first review the literature on spatial mismatch, which provides much of the...

Two key attributes of a job are its wage and its duration. Much has been made of changes in the wage distribution in the 1980s, but little attention has been given to job durations since Hall (1982). We fill this void by examining the temporal evolution of job retention rates in U.S. labor...

We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that...

We measure the impact of labor market referral networks defined by residential neighborhoods on re-employment following mass layoffs. Because networks can only be effective when hiring is occurring, we focus on a measure of the strength of the labor market network that includes not only the...