Employment and the Urban Poor: the Impact of Job Relocation

This book examines the impact on earnings and employment for inner city males resulting from the movement of manufacturing firms out of cities into suburban and rural settings, over the past several decades. The relocation of manufacturing employment has virtually eliminated the access of central city, low-skill workers to secure employment with benefits and room for advancement. However, demographic analysis reveals that low-skill workers have remained highly concentrated in inner cities even though low-skill jobs have moved outward in metropolitan areas. Economic theory has led many economists to believe that inner city workers are not interested in suburban employment because they do not move to the suburban
This book develops a new economic model that incorporates the unique difficulties faced by low income households which limits their ability to move to suburban locations. The model is used to make predictions about the impact on earnings and unemployment rates as job opportunities move to the suburbs. Multivariate regressions are used to test the theory in a cross- sectional analysis of the fifty largest metropolitan areas in the United States. The findings indicate that differences between the location of low income neighborhoods and the location of low-skill employment have significantly increased inner city unemployment rates over the past several decades
(Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of new York at Binghamton, 1995; revised with new preface and index)