JOB INFORMATION NETWORKS, NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS AND INEQUALITY Yannis M. Ioannides and Linda Datcher LouryThe paper explores the theoretical and empirical literature to examine the use by different social groups of informal sources of information provided by friends, relatives and acquaintances during job search and its consequences for the job market. It also addresses the role of network structure and size, the resource endowments of contacts, and nature of the links between contacts to explain differences in the effects of job information networks. In doing so, the paper also turns to the sociology literature on job information networks and provides an economic perspective on such sociological concepts as strong versus weak ties, inbreeding, distance from structural holes, etc. The paper distinguishes between models of exogenous job information networks, that is where individuals obtain job-related information through a given social structure, and endogenous job information networks, which are social networks that result from individuals' uncoordinated actions.The paper pays special attention to such issues as physical and social proximity and sharing of information and discusses them in the context of the recent social interactions and neighborhood effects literature. Finally, the paper outlines a model that integrates job information networks, where interactions occur in business cycle frequencies, with the dynamics of human capital formation, which include the joint effects of parental, community and neighborhood human capital, and are set in life cycle frequencies, for the purpose of organizing suggestions for future research and examining earned income inequality. effects is organized into a number of broad categories of seven stylized facts. Section 3 starts by reviewing the sociology literature on job information networks. It then turns in subsections 3.2 -2 3.5 to models of exogenous job information networks, ones in which individuals obtain job-related information through a given social structure and, in subsection 3.6, to the consequences for job information networks of the recent literature on evolutionary models of information transmission. ContentsSection 4 reviews models of endogenous information networks, ones which result from individuals' uncoordinated action. It starts in subsection 4.1 with the recent literature on strategic network formation and then examines, in subsection 4.2, endogenous job information networks. Section 5 sketches the outline of a model that integrates job information networks and the dynamics of human capital formation and thus provides an overarching theme for the purpose of examining earned income inequality. Section 6 summarizes suggestions for future research and Section 7 concludes. Stylized Facts about Job Information Networks and Neighborhood EffectsThe first generation of empirical work on job information networks has established several stylized facts about such networks. The first stylized fact is that there is widespread use of friends, relatives, a...

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The gender earnings gap among full-time workers narrowed substantially in the 1980s. Previous research has established that increases in the amount of and returns to work experience and schooling among women were primarily responsible for that trend. This paper, which uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and the High School and Beyond Senior Cohort (Class of 1980), examines to what extent college schooling characteristics other than number of years, such as grades and major field, contributed to the narrowing of the gap. Changes in the estimated effects of college grades and college major, the author finds, can account for almost all of the large decline in the gender earnings gap between 1979 and 1986 among young college-educated workers. Most of this effect apparently resulted from growth in the market price of women's skills relative to men's for a given major.

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