In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the overall unemployment rate in the ACT was virtually indistinguishable from that in the country as a whole. However, for the past twenty-five years, unemployment in the ACT has been lower – often substantially lower – than in the nation as a whole. The...

This Paper studies the impact of local economic structure on local sectoral employment growth. Local employment growth is decomposed into ‘internal’ growth (the growth of the size of existing plants) and ‘external’ growth (the creation of new plants). Using panel data methods, we...

Inter-regional migration is influenced by relative employment and earnings opportunities. But strongly offsetting forces operate from relative house prices. Commuting, at least to contiguous regions, is often an alternative to migration. Relative employment and earnings opportunities should...

This paper studies the role of internal migration in income convergence across regions in Japan. Neoclassical theory predicts that migration should have been an important source of convergence, but regression results suggest otherwise. The paper investigates the possibility that this discrepancy...

This paper investigates how physical, organisational, institutional, cognitive, social, and ethnic proximities between inventors shape their collaboration decisions. Using a new panel of UK inventors and a novel identification strategy, this paper systematically explores the net effects of all...

We analyse the impact of increased immigration on labour market outcomes of natives in Germany using a dataset of county-level variables for the late 1980s. We study two measures of immigration, the change in the share of foreigners between 1985 and 1989, and one-year gross and net flows of...

The spatial dispersion of economic agents is an immediate determinant of informational imperfections. We investigate how this dispersion creates search frictions and thus rationing. For that, we develop a model of local labour markets in which workers' search efficiency is negatively affected by...

Assuming that job search efficiency decreases with distance to jobs, workers’ location in a city depends on spatial elements such as commuting costs and land prices and on labour elements such as wages and the matching technology. In the absence of moving costs, we show that there exists a...

This paper investigates the impacts of capital mobility and tax competition in a setting with imperfect matching between firms and workers. The small country attracts fewer firms than the large one but accommodates a share of the industry that exceeds its capital share - a reverse home market...

The assumption of constant returns in the matching function, embodied in most bilateral search models, is crucial to ensure the uniqueness of the unemployment rate along a steady state growth path. This paper explores whether this is an acceptable assumption by estimating individual...