This paper provides new evidence to inform the policy debate about the effect of a newly important industry-the temporary help industry-on the labor market outcomes of low-income workers and those workers who are at risk of being on public assistance. The core issue of whether temporary help...

This article examines and compares the spatial distributions of new jobs and people across sub-metropolitan areas for Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The jobs data come from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and the data on people come from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The...

A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area's heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner-city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two-wave longitudinal survey of firms,...

In this paper we present data from a survey of 900 employers in Michigan during 1997. The survey was designed to gauge employer demand for welfare recipients. The results show that, given the tightness of labor markets there, the prospective demand for recipients is quite high-employers report...

This article attempts to review and synthesize some new evidence on the employment problems of young blacks, especially relating to the issues of skill and spatial mismatch, racial discrimination, crime, and immigration. I also discuss various interpretations of these phenomena and highlight the...

An Erratum for this article has been published in Journal of Policy Analysis and Management,26(1), 215.

In this paper, we explore the continuing decline in employment and labor force participation of nonenrolled Black men between the ages of 16 and 34 who have a high school education or less in the 1980s and 1990s. We focus on two fairly new developments: (1) the dramatic growth in the number of...