Skip Navigation



Journal of Economic Geography Advance Access published online on July 30, 2009
Journal of Economic Geography, doi:10.1093/jeg/lbp040
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Åslund, O.
Right arrow Articles by Zenou, Y.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

How important is access to jobs? Old question—improved answer

Olof Åslund*, John Östh{dagger} and Yves Zenou{ddagger},,§

*IFAU, Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation and Uppsala University, Box 513, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden and Center for Business and Policy Studies, SNS.
{dagger}Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Box 513, S-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.
{ddagger}Department of Economics, Stockholm University, S-106 91, Stockholm, Sweden and the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN).

§Corresponding author: email <yves.zenou{at}ne.su.se>

JEL classifications: J15, J18, R23

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.

Keywords: Job access, endogenous location, natural experiment, spatial mismatch
Date submitted: 3 June 2008     Date accepted: 7 July 2009


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.