| Abstract: | Youths have increasingly experienced labor market problems over the last several decades. One fruitful line of explanation focuses on structural changes in the demand for labor stemming from deindustrialization, changing skill requirements for employees, and increasing supply competition from women and recent immigrants. While these explanations merit attention, they have not adequately considered facts that condition their impact. This paper considers the argument that intra-metropolitan residential location conditions the effects of metropolitan labor market structure on black and white male youths' employment probabilities. Using a sample of individual-level data drawn from the 1990 census combined with metropolitan-level indicators of economic structure, it was found that some structural effects varied between central-city and suburban male youths. The conditioning role of residential location, and the subsequent nature of the structural effects, varied considerably between black and white male youths. Interpretations of the conditioning role of residential location include a variety of social and institutional effects on individual residents and the stigmatizing effects of some neighborhoods, especially on black male youths. |
