Why are regional unemployment differentials in Europe so persistent if, as the wage curve literature demonstrates, there is no compensation in labour markets? We hypothesize that workers in high-unemployment regions are compensated in housing markets. Modelling regional unemployment...

This paper reviews the empirical research that has been generated by Oswald’s thesis, which claims that there is a causal relationship from homeownership to unemployment. The literature confirms a decreasing effect of homeownership on geographical mobility of workers, but does not in general...

In this paper I argue that search theory is a useful addition to the way economists and geographers have approached the study of commuting behavior. This is illustrated by showing that introduction of a spatial element into the standard model of job search leads to the prediction of critical...

We develop a model of an economy with several regions, which differ in scale. Within each region, workers have to search for a job-type that matches their skill. They face a trade-off between match quality and the cost of extended search. This trade-off differs between regions, because search is...

The concentration of people with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds in particular geographic areas may boost the creation of new ideas, knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. In this paper we measure the impact of the size, skills, and diversity of immigration on the...

A burgeoning literature has emerged during the last two decades to assess the economic impacts of immigration on host countries. In recent years much research has been at the national level under the assumption that impacts in open regions may dissipate through adjustment processes such as...

Why has job growth over the past decades been weaker in the Dutch Randstad area than in surrounding regions? In a simultaneous equations analysis, we find that employment adjusts to the regional supply of labour. Net internal migration is predominantly determined by regional housing supply and...

This paper studies the interaction between job mobility and housing mobility by considering the duration of commutes. Conventional models assume that the employrnent location has priority over the residentiallocation and that the latter is adapted to the former. This implies that the duration of...

In this paper we determine the effect of transport cost on commuting flows, on the basis of an analysis of home-to-work journeys between municipalities in Denmark. Special attention is given to a proper estimation method and the form of the distance-decay function. It appears that neither an...

This paper uses longitudinal survey data to assess factors affecting the duration of unemployment in Russia. We examine four types of marginalised labour force participants, according to ILO guidelines and survey responses, and we estimate duration models for each type. It turns out that the...