The persistence of local joblessness

Michael Amior, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Alan Manning, London School of Economics and Political Science

(Project no. 1000201, previously 30181)

Local joblessness is very persistent over time in the UK, and we aim to understand why. This is fundamentally an empirical question, and we will address it using econometric methods. We have already studied this question using US data, and we hope to make comparisons between the two countries.

Using the longitudinal aspect of the data, we will study the demographic characteristics and housing tenure of people who leave low-employment areas. We want to check whether local differences in demographic composition are responsible for the persistence in local joblessness. To this end, we will purge observable demographic characteristics (in particular: age, education, ethnicity and immigrant status) from local employment rates using statistical regression. Then, using the longitudinal aspect of the data, we will study the demographic characteristics and housing tenure of people who leave low-employment areas. We then want to study how long-distance commuting patterns change following local declines in employment.