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How important is Access to Jobs? Old Question----Improved Answer Olof Aslund, John Osth and Yves Zenou ZHAO XUE & L

How important is Access to Jobs? Old Question----Improved Answer Olof Aslund, John Osth and Yves Zenou ZHAO XUE & LIU YANG. The paper studies the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings .

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How important is Access to Jobs? Old Question----Improved Answer Olof Aslund, John Osth and Yves Zenou ZHAO XUE & L

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  1. How important is Access to Jobs?Old Question----Improved AnswerOlof Aslund, John Osth and Yves ZenouZHAO XUE & LIU YANG

  2. The paper studies theimpact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. • The analysis suggests that residential sorting leads to underestimation of the impact of job access.

  3. Some backgrounds • The recent riots in France(2005), England(2001) and the United State(1992) • Most of the rioters belonged to ethnic minority groups. The common explanation put forward was the high degree of racial segregation and the high unemployment rates experienced by these groups.

  4. Kain(1968) • The spatial mismatch hypothesis: Residing in urban segregated areas distant from and poorly connected to major centers of employment growth, minority workers face strong geographic barriers to finding and keeping well-paid jobs.

  5. How to test? • The usual approach is to relate a measure of labor market outcomes (employment or earnings), based on either individual or aggregate data, to a measure of job access, typically some index that captures the distance from residences to centers of employment.

  6. But it has some problems… • It is plagued by endogeneity problems. --families are not randomly assigned a residential location but instead choose it. • Measure of job accessibility often contain measurement errors. • Omitted variables may bias the results. ---neighborhood variables

  7. How to overcome the econometric problems ?? • Exploiting a quasi-experiment based on a policy in Sweden, under which the government assigned refugees to neighborhoods with different degrees of geographic job accessibility • Using a very rich dataset with coordinates for the residence and workplace of all Swedish workers, which enables us to calculate individual based job access measures.

  8. Theories • Smith & Zenou (2003) Worker’s job search efficiency may decrease with distance to jobs • Coulson et al (2001), Brueckner & Zenou (2003) Workers may refuse that involve commutes that are too long because commuting to that job would be too costly in view of the proposed wage. • Wilson (2006), Zenou& Boccard (2000) If worker’s productivity negatively depends on distance to jobs then workers may refuse jobs that involve commutes that are too long and employers may be less willing to hire people living far away from the workplace.

  9. Some facts about Sweden---The refugee placement policy in the 1990s • In 1985, the Swedish Immigration Board was given the responsibility of handling refugee reception. • The idea was to distribute asylum seekers over a larger number of municipalities that had suitable characteristic for reception, such as educational and labor market opportunities.

  10. Data and empirical strategy • Two samples of Swedish residents: ----Refugees arriving in 1990-91 ----a random sample of the entire Swedish population • All data used come from the Uppsala University geographical database PLACE

  11. How to measure JOB ACCESS? • The log of the number of jobs within a 5 km radius from the individual’s place of living. • The log of the number of people living within a 5 km radius from the individual’s place of living.

  12. We found…… • Earnings and employment are much lower among the refugees. • Job access measure shows that refugees live in more populated and job-dense area.

  13. Empirical strategy • Yi---outcome of individual i in year 1999 (the outcome variables include employment, log annual earnings) • Xi---a set of standard characteristics for individual I ( age, age squared, gender, family status, level of education, and country of origin) • jobit---job access variables • Dj---a set of municipal dummy variables We estimate these models both for the random population sample and for the1990-91 refugee cohorts.

  14. Empirical results

  15. The apparent importance of job access

  16. Causal effects of job access

  17. Main findings • Immigrants who in 1990-91 were placed in a location surrounded by few jobs had difficulties to find work also after several years in 1990. • Residential sorting leads to underestimates of the geographic distance to jobs. • Immigrants have lower access to jobs than natives but this cannot fully explain the vast employment gap between immigrant and native workers.

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