A new paradigm for transport economists has been established: revenues of a welfare-maximising road tax should be employed to reduce the level of a distortionary income tax. An essential modelling assumption to reach this conclusion is that the number of workdays is optimally chosen, whereas...

The growth in women's participation in the labor force has attracted attention to the gender differences in commuting behavior, and to their implications. This study analyses the relationship between individual commuting behavior and household responsibilities, with a focus on gender differences...

This paper uses the quantitative spatial model with heterogeneous locations linked by costly goods trade, migration and commuting developed in Monte et al. (2018) to address the workings of local labor markets in Germany. One key contribution concerns the analysis of the role of the expenditure...

We show how small initial wealth differences between low skilled black and white workers can generate large differences in their labor-market outcomes. This even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against blacks or exogenous differences in the distance to jobs. Because of the...

The U.K. government has recently committed itself to an ambitious 80 per cent employment rate target. Recognising that achieving this aspiration will require significant numbers of the economically inactive to (re-)engage with the labour market, the government has enacted various policy reforms...

A search model of the labor market is augmented to include commuting time to work. The theory posits that wages are positively related to commute distance, by a factor itself depending negatively on the bargaining power of workers. Since not all combinations of distance and wages are accepted,...

This paper provides a simple theory of geographical mobility which simultaneously explains people’s choice of residences in space and the location of industry. Residences are chosen on the basis of the utility which mobile households obtain across locations. The spatial pattern of industry is...

We develop a standard search-matching model in which mobility costs are so high that it is too costly for workers to relocate when a change in their employment status occurs. We show that, in equilibrium, wages increase with distance to jobs and commuting costs because firms need to compensate...

We propose a spatial search-matching model where both job creation and job destruction are endogenous. Workers are ex ante identical but not ex post since their job can be hit by a technological shock, which decreases their productivity. They reside in a city and commuting to the job center...

Recent theoretical work has examined the spatial distribution of unemployment using the efficiency wage model as the mechanism by which unemployment arises in the urban economy. This paper extends the standard efficiency wage model in order to allow for behavioral substitution between leisure...