Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Langella, Monica
• Manning, Alan

Titel

Residential mobility and unemployment in the UK

Ist Teil von

• Labour economics, 2022-04, Vol.75, p.102104, Article 102104

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •People are more likely to move out of high unemployment areas and into low unemployment areas.•Labour markets are very local so neighbourhood unemployment rates matter.•The mobility of some groups is more sensitive to unemployment than others. The UK has suffered from persistent spatial differences in unemployment rates for many decades. A low responsiveness of internal migration to unemployment is often argued to be an important cause of this problem. This paper uses UK census data to investigate how unemployment affects residential mobility using small areas as potential destinations and origins and four decades of data. It finds that both in- and out-migration are affected by local unemployment - but also that there is a very high ‘cost of distance’, so most moves are very local. We complement the study with individual longitudinal data to analyse individual heterogeneities in mobility. We show that elasticities to local unemployment are different across people with different characteristics. For instance, people who are better educated are more sensitive, the same applies to homeowners. Ethnic minorities are on average less sensitive to local unemployment rates and tend to end up in higher unemployment areas when moving.