How Crucial is Distance to Jobs for Ethnic Minorities? Old Question – Improved Answer

• We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to obtain exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having been placed in a location with poor job access in 1990–1991 adversely affected employment in 1999. Doubling the number of jobs in the initial location in 1990–1991 is associated with 2.9 percentage points higher employment probability in 1999. Considering that the 1999 employment rate was 43% among the refugees, this is a considerable effect. The analysis suggests that residential sorting leads to underestimation of the impact of job access.

Nyckelord

Job access

endogenous location

natural experiment

spatial mismatch

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)