Residential mobility and unemployment in the UK

Monica Langella and Alan Manning

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: residential mobility; regional inequality; unemployment; UKRI fund (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J60 R23 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2022-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-eur, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Labour Economics, 1, April, 2022, 75. ISSN: 0927-5371

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/113323/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Residential mobility and unemployment in the UK (2022)
Working Paper: Residential mobility and unemployment in the UK (2019)
Working Paper: Residential mobility and unemployment in the UK (2019)
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:ehl:lserod:113323

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().