Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T19:37:11.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Location and Unemployment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2023

Bruce Bradbury  and
Jenny Chalmers
Bruce Bradbury
Affiliation:
Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales
Jenny Chalmers
Affiliation:
Centre for Applied Social Research, School of Social Science and Planning, RMIT University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Are people receiving unemployment-related income support more likely to exit from income support if they live in a stronger labour market? This paper examines this question using data from the Australian Department of Family and Community Services Longitudinal Data Set (LDS). We find that, controlling for other observed characteristics, living in an area with a one percentage point lower unemployment rate is associated with a 5 per cent increase in the probability of exit. This implies a 9 per cent decrease in the mean duration of benefit receipt. This should be considered an upper bound for the impact of regional labour market characteristics as it partly reflects the fact that people with low skill levels can only afford to live in high unemployment regions. To control for unobserved characteristics (such as skill levels) that are constant over time we look at changes in income support among people who move location. This suggests a much lower, but still significant, impact of local labour market conditions on unemployment benefit receipt.

Type
Symposium on Social Inclusion
Information
The Economic and Labour Relations Review , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , January 2004 , pp. 208 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2004

Footnotes

*

This paper is based on work funded through the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). AHURI gratefully acknowledges the financial and other support it has received from the Commonwealth, State and Territory governments. The authors would like to thank the members of the project user group, Garry Barrett, Bill Mudd, Peter Murphy and Joan Vipond, together with Alex Heath, AHURI staff, seminar participants and an anonymous referee for comments on earlier versions of this paper.

References

Allison, Paul (1982) ‘Discrete-time Methods for the Analysis of Event Histories’ Sociological Methodology, 13: 61–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bradbury, Bruce, Chalmers, Jenny (2003) Housing Location and Employment Final Report, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.Google Scholar
Dockery, A.M. (2000) ‘Regional Unemployment Rate Differentials and Mobility of the Unemployed: An Analysis of the FaCS Longitudinal Data set’ International Journal of Manpower, 21 (5): 400–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ellwood, D.T. (1983) “The spatial mismatch hypothesis: Are there teenage jobs missing in the ghetto?” NBER Working Paper No. w1188. Also published in Freeman, R.B., Holzer, H.J. (Eds.) (1986), The black youth employment crisis (pp. 147–151). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gregg, Paul; Machin, Stephen and Manning, Alan (2003) ‘Mobility and Joblessness’ draft paper in Card, David, Blundell, Richard and Freeman, Richard B. (Ed) (forthcoming) Seeking a Premiere Economy: The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980–2000 University of Chicago Press. {Available from http://www.nber.org/books/bcf/}.Google Scholar
Gregory, R.G., Hunter, Boyd (1995) The Macro economy and the growth of ghettos and urban poverty in Australia CEPR Discussion Paper No 325, ANU.Google Scholar
Herzog, Henry W; Schlottmann, Alan M., Boehm, Thomas P. (1993) ‘Migration as Spatial Job-search: A Survey of Empirical Findings’ Regional Studies 27 (4): 327–340.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hulse, Kath (2002) Demand Subsidies for Private Renters: A Comparative Review Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Positioning Paper.Google Scholar
Jenkins, S. (1995) “Easy Estimation Methods for Discrete-Time Duration Models”, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 57: 129–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jenkins, S. (2004) Survival Analysis Draft book available from www.iser.essex.ac.uk/teaching/stephenj/ec968/ Google Scholar
Jenkins, S., Garcia-Serrano, C. (2000) “Re-Employment Probabilities for Spanish Men: What Role Does the Unemployment Benefit System Play?” Discussion Paper 55, Institute for Labour Research, University of Essex, UK.Google Scholar
Kain, John F. (1968) “Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 82 (2): 175–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keels, Micere Keels; Duncan, Greg J.; Deluca, Stephanie; Mendenhall, Ruby, Rosenbaum, James (2003) “Fifteen Years Later: Can Residential Mobility Programs Provide A Permanent Escape from Neighborhood Segregation, Crime, and Poverty?” JCPR Working Paper No. 330.Google Scholar
Ludwig, Jens; Duncan, Greg J., Hirschfield, Paul (2001) “Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-Mobility Experiment”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, May, 655–679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ian, Morrow (2000) “The Internal Migration of Workforce Age Welfare Recipients in Australia”, Paper presented at the Australian Population Association Conference, Melbourne.Google Scholar
McDonald, Peter (1995) ‘Creating Jobs: Where they are Needed, When they Count Australian Urban and Regional Development Review’, Discussion Paper No 3.Google Scholar
Oswald, A. (1996) ‘A Conjecture on the Explanation for High Unemployment in the Industrialised Nations: Part 1. University of Warwick Working Paper No. 475, December.Google Scholar
Pekkala, Sari, Tervo, Hannu (2002) ‘Unemployment and Migration: Does Moving Help’, Scandinavian Journal of Economics 104 (4), 621–639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, W.J. (1996) When work disappears: The world of the new urban poor. New York: Knopf. Wulff, M. and Bell, M. (1997) Internal Migration, Social Welfare and Settlement Patterns: Impacts on Households and Communities, DIMA, Canberra.CrossRefGoogle Scholar