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Tony Champion and Mike Coombes, University of Newcastle and Ian Gordon, London School of Economics and Political Science
(Project no. 301129, previously 30112 and 0301124)
The project aims at understanding how far spatial disparities in human capital arise from migration as opposed to differences between places in developing their own labour force capacity. The research also seeks to discover the impact of local human capital on individual people's productivity, and other labour market outcomes.
There are three main objects of research:
1. To measure the 'escalator' effect; identifying between-place differences in career progression and seeing how far migration responds to these and exacerbates spatial disparities in human capital.
2. To examine the role of investments within the family and in schools, looking at how these affect spatial disparities in education and training outcomes.
3. To investigate the extent to which people's productivity and wages are affected by place differences and changes in local labour market composition.
No other dataset has the combination of such large sample size, high tracing rates over time and detail on personal characteristics. At a later stage, we will explore the possibility of updating these results to 2007 using the less comprehensive data in ASHE. We also plan to undertake parallel work using the BHPS, primarily focused on London but also Urban South versus Urban North, BHPS sample size permitting.