Neighborhood Signaling Effects, Commuting Time, and Employment: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Magnus Carlsson, Abdulaziz Abrar Reshid () and Dan-Olof Rooth
Additional contact information
Abdulaziz Abrar Reshid: Linnaeus University

No 11284, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The question of whether and how living in a deprived neighborhood affects the labor market outcomes of its residents has been a subject of great interest for both policy makers and researchers. Despite this interest, empirical evidence of causal neighborhood effects on labor market outcomes is scant, and causal evidence on the mechanisms involved is even more scant. The mechanism that this study investigates is neighborhood signaling effects. Specifically, we ask whether there is unequal treatment in hiring depending on whether a job applicant signals living in a bad (deprived) neighborhood or in a good (affluent) neighborhood. To this end, we conducted a field experiment where fictitious job applications were sent to employers with an advertised vacancy. Each job application was randomly assigned a residential address in either a bad or a good neighborhood. The measured outcome is the fraction of invitations for a job interview (the callback rate). We find no evidence of general neighborhood signaling effects. However, job applicants with a foreign background have callback rates that are 42 percent lower if they signal living in a bad neighborhood rather than in a good neighborhood. In addition, we find that applicants with commuting times longer than 90 minutes have lower callback rates, and this is unrelated to the neighborhood signaling effect. Apparently, employers view information about residential addresses as important for employment decisions.

Keywords: neighborhood signaling effects; neighborhood stigma; commuting time; discrimination; field experiment; correspondence study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J15 J21 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published - published in: International Journal of Manpower, 2018, 39 (4), 534-549.

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11284.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:iza:izadps:dp11284

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().