Publication type
Conference Paper
Series
Understanding Society Scientific Conference 2015, 21-23 July 2015, University of Essex, Colchester, UK
Author
Publication date
July 23, 2015
Summary
This paper studies the effect of family background on ethnic minority members’ success in the labour market, taking their neighbourhood context into account. Ethnic minority members are often more educated than the white British, regardless of their family background. This high education does not translate itself into better labour market positions however. This paper suggests that family background is supplemented by social and ethnic capital in the neighbourhood. Stronger ethnic communities may help in finding employment positions when the main labour market is less hospitable. These contacts will lead to less desirable jobs on average however. Own resources will matter more to obtain high-skilled jobs, as contacts across ethnic boundaries are needed. Parental resources affect their offspring’s outcomes but have to be studied within the community context. This paper estimates multilevel models on UK data to analyse how the importance of family background depends on the ethnic composition and the average resources in the community. We use Understanding Society to analyse this longitudinally. This is supplemented with the Destinations of Leavers From Higher Education (DLHE) survey to analyse the returns to higher education for ethnic minorities in more detail. Preliminary results indicate that the effect of parental education on the probability of employment depends on the share of co-ethnics in the neighbourhood (at MSOA level) and the educational resources of co-ethnics. The effects differ by ethnicity, with neighbourhood resources adding to parental resources for South-Asian and Chinese minorities while they aid employment of black African /Caribbean minorities of less advantaged backgrounds.
Subjects
Link
Cid:523158