Opportunity and Choice in Socially Structured Labor Markets

Employment outcomes depend on opportunity and choice, both of which are subject to structural influences. This article presents a new approach to studying the factors that determine employment outcomes. It develops a statistical technique, two-sided logit (TSL), directly from a model of the preferences and resources of employers and workers. Opportunity and choice are functions of these preferences and resources. Application of the TSL model to 1972-90 GSS data shows substantial variation in the importance of the worker characteristics of education, race, and age for the opportunity for employment in different occupational categories. The relationships of TSL to other sociological and economic models are also discussed.

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