Persistent Disparities in Regional Unemployment: Application of a Spatial Filtering Approach to Local Labour Markets in Germany

Roberto Patuelli (), Norbert Schanne (), Daniel Griffith () and Peter Nijkamp
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Daniel Griffith: School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Quaderni della facoltà di Scienze economiche dell'Università di Lugano from USI Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract: The geographical distribution and persistence of regional/local unemployment rates in heterogeneous economies (such as Germany) have been, in recent years, the subject of various theoretical and empirical studies. Several researchers have shown an interest in analysing the dynamic adjustment processes of unemployment and the average degree of dependence of the current unemployment rates or gross domestic product from the ones observed in the past. In this paper, we present a new econometric approach to the study of regional unemployment persistence, in order to account for spatial heterogeneity and/or spatial autocorrelation in both the levels and the dynamics of unemployment. First, we propose an econometric procedure suggesting the use of spatial filtering techniques as a substitute for fixed effects in a panel estimation framework. The spatial filter computed here is a proxy for spatially distributed region-specific information (e.g., the endowment of natural resources, or the size of the ‘home market’) that is usually incorporated in the fixed effects coefficients. The advantages of our proposed procedure are that the spatial filter, by incorporating region-specific information that generates spatial autocorrelation, frees up degrees of freedom, simultaneously corrects for time-stable spatial autocorrelation in the residuals, and provides insights about the spatial patterns in regional adjustment processes. In the paper we present several experiments in order to investigate the spatial pattern of the heterogeneous autoregressive coefficients estimated for unemployment data for German NUTS-3 regions.

Keywords: unemployment persistence; dynamic panel; hysteresis; spatial filtering; fixed effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C23 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2010-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm, nep-geo and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: PERSISTENCE OF REGIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT: APPLICATION OF A SPATIAL FILTERING APPROACH TO LOCAL LABOR MARKETS IN GERMANY (2012)
Working Paper: Persistence of Regional Unemployment: Application of a Spatial Filtering Approach to Local Labour Markets in Germany (2011)
Working Paper: Persistence of Regional Unemployment: Application of a Spatial Filtering Approach to Local Labour Markets in Germany (2011)
Working Paper: Persistent disparities in regional unemployment: Application of a spatial filtering approach to local labour markets in Germany (2010)
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