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CEP discussion paper

Commuting, migration and local joblessness


Britain suffers from persistent spatial disparities in employment rates. This paper develops an integrated framework for analyzing two forces expected to equalize economic opportunity across areas: commuting and migration. Our framework is applicable to any level of spatial aggregation, and we use it to assess their contribution to labor market adjustment across British wards (or neighborhoods). Commuting offers only limited insurance against local shocks, because commutes are typically short and shocks are heavily correlated spatially. Analogously, migration fails to fully equalize opportunity because of strong temporal correlation in local demand shocks.


Michael Amior and Alan Manning

4 June 2019     Paper Number CEPDP1623

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This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Community Wellbeing programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Determinants of community economic performance