Helping Hands: Race, Neighborhood Context, and Reluctance in Providing Job-Finding Assistance

Abstract

In order to explain persistent racial inequality, researchers have posited that black Americans receive fewer job benefits from their social networks because of their reluctance to provide assistance to others who are looking for work. We test this idea on a national scale using geo-coded data from the General Social Survey. Our results show that, on average, blacks offer more frequent job-finding assistance to their friends than do whites. However, additional analyses reveal that race-based job-finding assistance is context dependent, as blacks living in areas characterized by concentrated black poverty have lower odds of helping others search for jobs than members of other races and in other community contexts.