This article examines differences in labor market participation and unemployment between immigrant groups in different countries. The authors argue that two macro designs must be combined to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the economic integration of immigrant groups. Instead of reliance on observations of multiple-origin groups in a single destination or a single-origin group in multiple destinations, multiple origins in multiple destinations are compared, suggesting that the economic status of immigrants may be affected by the country from which they come (“origin effect”), the country to which they migrate (“destination effect”), and the specific relations between origins and destinations (“community effect”). From the human capital theory, compositional hypotheses are derived, which predict that these macro effects can be attributed to the selection of human capital. From discrimination theories, contextual hypotheses are deduced, which maintain that macro effects can be ascribed to in-group preferences and out-group prejudices. Data on immigrants' labor force activity and employment in 18 Western countries during the period 1980 to 2001 are reported. Using multilevel techniques, the analysis shows that compositional differences associated with political suppression in the countries of origin, relative income inequality, and geographic distance affect the labor force status of immigrants. Contextual effects play a role as well in terms of religious origin, the presence of left wing parties in the government, and the size of the immigrant community.

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a b s t r a c tNeighborhood social capital is increasingly considered to be an important determinant of an individual's health. Using data from the Netherlands we investigate the influence of neighborhood social capital on an individual's self-reported health, while accounting for other conditions of health on both the level of the neighborhood and the individual. We use national representative data ('The Housing and Living Survey', 2006) on the Netherlands with 61,235 respondents in 3273 neighborhoods. The cross-sectional data were combined with information provided by Statistics Netherlands on neighborhoods, i.e., the percentage of residents in the highest income quintile per neighborhood and the municipality's degree of urbanity. The association of neighborhood social capital with individual health was assessed by multilevel logistic regression analysis. Our results show that neighborhood social capital is positively associated with health. Interestingly, residents in urban neighborhoods benefit particularly from their neighborhood social capital.

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This study investigates the degree to which community can be found in Dutch neighbourhoods and attempts to explain why there is more community in some neighbourhoods than in others. We apply a perspective on community which assumes that people create communities with the expectation to realize some important well-being goals. Conditions that account for the creation of a local community are specified, i.e. the opportunity, ease, and motivation to do so. These conditions are realized when (i) neighbourhoods have more meeting places; (ii) neighbours are, given their resources and interests, motivated to invest in local relationships; (iii) neighbours have few relations outside of the neighbourhood, and (iv) neighbours are mutually interdependent. Data from the Survey of Social Networks of the Dutch on 1,007 respondents in 168 neighbourhoods are used. Results show that there is a sizeable amount of community in Dutch neighbourhoods and that all the four conditions contribute to the explanation, while interdependencies among neighbours have the strongest impact on the creation of community.