Do Low-Wage Employers Discriminate Against Applicants with Long Commutes? Evidence from a Correspondence Experiment

I use a correspondence study of the low-wage labor market in Washington, DC to test whether employers discriminate against applicants who live further from the job location. Fictional résumés randomly assigned to have addresses far from the job location receive 14% fewer callbacks than nearby addresses. Living 5-6 miles away from the job results in a penalty equal to that received by applicants with stereotypically black names. Because commute distances and neighborhood poverty tend to be correlated, this effect can account for two-thirds of discrimination against applicants from poor neighborhoods measured in previous experiments. JEL Codes: J7; R2; J6