Proximity and opportunity: How residence and race affect the employment of welfare recipients

This article examines the relationship between access to jobs, work activity, and welfare receipt. We hypothesize that welfare recipients who live in closer proximity to employment opportunities are more likely to work and less likely to remain on welfare than those who live farther away. To test this hypothesis, we analyze two unique data sets. The first has information on the residences and characteristics of welfare recipients; the second contains a list of the location of jobs in the three-county Detroit metropolitan area in the late 1990s. We find that, after controlling for individual characteristics, greater proximity to employment opportunities is associated with both a higher probability of working and a higher probability of leaving welfare.