TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate 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.Design/methodology/approach The authors 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).Findings The authors 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, the authors find that applicants with commuting times longer than 90 minutes have lower callback rates, and this is unrelated to the neighborhood signaling effect.Originality/value Empirical evidence of causal neighborhood effects on labor market outcomes is scant, and causal evidence on the mechanisms involved is even more scant. The paper provides such evidence.
VL  - 39
IS  - 4
SN  - 0143-7720
DO  - 10.1108/IJM-09-2017-0234
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-09-2017-0234
AU  - Carlsson Magnus
AU  - Reshid Abdulaziz Abrar
AU  - Rooth Dan-Olof
PY  - 2018
Y1  - 2018/01/01
TI  - Neighborhood signaling effects, commuting time, and employment: Evidence from a field experiment
T2  - International Journal of Manpower
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 534
EP  - 549
Y2  - 2024/04/19
ER  -