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Persistence of Regional Unemployment: Application of a Spatial Filtering Approach to Local Labour Markets in Germany

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Author Info

  • Roberto Patuelli

    () ( Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Italy; The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (RCEA), Italy)

  • Norbert Schanne

    () (Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, Germany)

  • Daniel A. Griffith

    () (School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, USA)

  • Peter Nijkamp

    () (Department of Spatial Economics, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Abstract

The geographical distribution and persistence of regional/local unemployment rates in heterogeneous economies (such as Germany) have been, in recent years, the subject of various theoretical and empirical studies. Several researchers have shown an interest in analysing the dynamic adjustment processes of unemployment and the average degree of dependence of the current unemployment rates or gross domestic product from the ones observed in the past. In this paper, we present a new econometric approach to the study of regional unemployment persistence, in order to account for spatial heterogeneity and/or spatial autocorrelation in both the levels and the dynamics of unemployment. First, we propose an econometric procedure suggesting the use of spatial filtering techniques as a substitute for fixed effects in a panel estimation framework. The spatial filter computed here is a proxy for spatially distributed region-specific information (e.g., the endowment of natural resources, or the size of the ‘home market’) that is usually incorporated in the fixed effects parameters. The advantages of our proposed procedure are that the spatial filter, by incorporating region-specific information that generates spatial autocorrelation, frees up degrees of freedom, simultaneously corrects for time-stable spatial autocorrelation in the residuals, and provides insights about the spatial patterns in regional adjustment processes. We present several experiments in order to investigate the spatial pattern of the heterogeneous autoregressive parameters estimated for unemployment data for German NUTS-3 regions. We find widely heterogeneous but generally high persistence in regional unemployment rates.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis in its series Working Paper Series with number 49_09.

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Date of creation: Jan 2009
Date of revision: Nov 2011
Publication status: Published in the Journal of Regional Science 52 (2): 300-23
Handle: RePEc:rim:rimwps:49_09

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Keywords: unemployment persistence; dynamic panel; hysteresis; spatial filtering; fixed effects;

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References

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Citations

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Cited by:
  1. Heyer, Gerd & Koch, Susanne & Stephan, Gesine & Wolff, Joachim, 2011. "Evaluation der aktiven Arbeitsmarktpolitik: Ein Sachstandsbericht für die Instrumentenreform 2011 (Evaluation of active labor market programs : a summary of recent results for the German program refo," IAB Discussion Paper 201117, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].
  2. E. Marelli & R. Patuelli & M. Signorelli, 2011. "Regional Unemployment in the EU before and after the Global Crisis," Working Papers wp791, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
  3. M. Mayor-Fernández & R. Patuelli, 2012. "Short-Run Regional Forecasts: Spatial Models through Varying Cross-Sectional and Temporal Dimensions," Working Papers wp835, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
  4. Wrede, Matthias, 2011. "Unemployment, commuting, and search intensity," IWQW Discussion Paper Series 12/2011, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Institut für Wirtschaftspolitik und Quantitative Wirtschaftsforschung (IWQW).
  5. Osiander, Christopher & Steinke, Joß, 2011. "Street-level bureaucrats in der Arbeitsverwaltung : Dienstleistungsprozesse und reformierte Arbeitsvermittlung aus Sicht der Vermittler," IAB Discussion Paper 201115, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].

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