Although the average rate of unemployment across U.S. metropolitan areas declined between 1980 and 2000, the geographic …'s metropolitan areas became increasingly divided into high- and low-unemployment areas. This paper documents this trend using data on …

The costs of unemployment usually are stated in terms of the amount of aggregate income that is foregone because of … unemployment by the amount that people would be willing to pay to avoid it. The authors' model treats unemployment as a region …-specific disamenity, and uses regional cross-migration data to reveal preferences towards income and unemployment. …

The natural rate of unemployment changes over time as a result of structural shifts in the distribution of employment …. A time--varying measure of the natural rate is constructed as the rate of unemployment that is consistent with the … economy growing at its equilibrium rate, conditional on the level of labor market turbulence. The natural rate of unemployment …