Empowering through proximity: How female neighbors serve as local social capital for refugee women

• In Event: The Increasing Significance of Local Context in Immigrant Integration

Abstract

Living in the right or wrong neighborhood predicts not only school dropout rates or wages but also mental health and even suicides. While the basic link between place and inequality is well investigated, causal studies on neighborhood effects remain scarce. Using nationwide administrative data from Germany and a quasi-experimental identification approach, we propose a new strategy to investigate how local social capital shapes individual-level employment probabilities. In exploiting variation over time, within cities, and between 1×1 kilometer grid cells, we provide a causal effect of gendered neighborhood employment effects on refugee women’s employment probability. Results show a direct job-referral effect from full-time employed female neighbors, which is strongest for other neighborhood women from refugee countries. Analyses on locally prevalent female work norms show a positive but one-time effect only for higher employment shares of native neighbors, indicating that neighbors serve as role models only before other structures are settled. In analyzing neighborhood effects by gender and ethnicity, our study finds that seemingly weak forms of neighborhood networks can provide useful resources for disadvantaged social groups in the labor market. Hence, the study stresses the necessity to break down dichotomies such as gender and ethnicity, not only when explaining but also when finding alternative pathways for circumventing combined hurdles of intersectionality

Authors

• Kerstin Ostermann, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg / Institute for Employment Research (IAB)

• Sebastian Werner Baehr, Institute for Employment Research (IAB)