Abstract
ABSTRACT We propose a model of excess commuting based on search costs in the labor market and show how the equilibrium rate of excess commuting is determined by the degree of geographical job concentration – without neglecting the importance of the size of the labor market and commuting costs. We test – and largely confirm – the main predictions of our model using Belgian population data on commuting flows between all its 589 municipalities. Our approach is to aggregate the data into 640 sectors and skill-specific groups in order to generate heterogeneity in the excess commuting rate. We find that workers in sectors with a high degree of job concentration have lower rates of excess commuting and that workers that operate in larger labor markets, such as higher educated workers and men compared to women, have higher rates of excess commuting.
Highlights
Excess commuting refers to the commuting that exceeds the minimum required commuting in an area (Hamilton 1982; Small & Song 1992; Rouwendal 1998; Ma & Banister 2006; van Ommeren & van der Straaten 2008; Kanaroglou et al 2015; Jun et al 2018)
In order to see how the equilibrium rate of excess commuting ߩ∗ is affected by the level of commuting costs, the size of the labor market, reservation wages and the spatial structure of workers and jobs, we study the partial derivatives of ߩ∗(partially deriving equation (5) using equation (9) and equation (12))
We develop a simple model of excess commuting as a result of search costs in the labor market and focus on how the resulting excess commuting in equilibrium is determined by a limited number of labor market parameters
Summary
Excess commuting refers to the commuting that exceeds the minimum required commuting in an area (Hamilton 1982; Small & Song 1992; Rouwendal 1998; Ma & Banister 2006; van Ommeren & van der Straaten 2008; Kanaroglou et al 2015; Jun et al 2018). In a seminal study, Hamilton (1982) reports very large levels of excess orwasteful’ commuting and provocatively interprets these as evidence against the monocentric model in which workers choose residential locations by minimizing commuting costs conditional upon housing prices. Hamilton shows that actual commuting is almost what one would expect if commuting were random and concludes that the monocentric model “does an almost unbelievable bad job of predicting commuting behavior”. Hamilton’s findings initiated some debate on the degree of excess commuting and on how to measure it, but the literature appears to agree that excess commuting is substantial (Small & Song 1992; Ma & Banister 2006; Kanaroglou et al 2015)
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