We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The

analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to obtain exogenous variation in

individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and

workplaces in Sweden, we find that having been placed in a location with poor job

access in 1990–1991 adversely affected employment in 1999. Doubling the number

of jobs in the initial location in 1990–1991 is associated with 2.9 percentage points

higher employment probability in 1999. Considering that the 1999 employment rate

was 43% among the refugees, this is a considerable effect. The analysis suggests

that residential sorting leads to underestimation of the impact of job access.