Access to Jobs and Individual Labor Market Outcomes

Andreas Mense, Wolfgang Dauth and Matthias Wrede

No 13040, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We investigate the employment effects of job access within cities. To overcome the endogeneity of residential location choices, we exploit the quasi-random allocation of applicants across affordable housing units in five German cities and propose a novel IV strategy. Our job access measure combines proximity to jobs in both geographical and skill space, taking into account potential competition from other workers. We compile a unique administrative dataset comprising the complete labor market biographies of individuals who moved into affordable housing. A one-standard-deviation increase in job access reduces the unemployment hazard of unskilled workers by 3.4 percentage points. We do not find similar effects for skilled workers, who are more likely to own a car and are therefore less geographically constrained. Simulations show that full segregation, with all unskilled allocated to central neighborhoods, would reduce the city-wide unemployment rate of the largest city in our sample, Munich, by 1.3 percentage points.

Keywords: job access; unemployment; urban labor markets; labor supply; affordable housing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 I38 J13 R23 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp13040.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().