The Library

Commuting in Great Britain in the 1990s

Tools

Benito, Andrew and Oswald, Andrew J. (2000) Commuting in Great Britain in the 1990s. Working Paper. Coventry: University of Warwick, Department of Economics. Warwick economic research papers (No.560).

Preview

PDF
WRAP_Benito_twerp560.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download (71Kb)

Official URL: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/resear...

Abstract

The paper studies commuting in Great Britain in the 1990s. The average one-way commute to work is now 38 minutes in London, 33 minutes in the south-east, and 21 minutes in the rest of the country. There are three other findings. First, commuting times are especially long among the highly educated, among home-owners, and among those who work in large plants and offices. In Britain, people with university degrees spend 50% more time travelling to work than those with low qualifications. Private renters do much less commuting than owner-occupiers. Second, there has recently been a rise in commuting times in the south-east and the capital. In our sample, full-time workers in London have lost 70 minutes per week of leisure time to commuting during the course of the 1990s. By contrast, outside the south-east of Britain, there has been no increase in commuting over this decade. In the south-east, 30% of workers now take at least 45 minutes to get to work. In the rest of the country, only 10% do. Third, after controlling for other factors and allowing for the endogeneity of the wage rate, there is a ceteris paribus inverse relationship between commuting hours and hourly pay.

Item Type:

Working or Discussion Paper (Working Paper)

Subjects:

H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor

Divisions:

Faculty of Social Sciences > Economics

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):

Commuting -- Great Britain, Transportation -- Great Britain, Employer-sponsored transportation, Great Britain -- Economic conditions

Series Name:

Warwick economic research papers

Publisher:

University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Place of Publication:

Coventry

Official Date:

April 2000

Dates:

Date	Event
April 2000	Published

Number:

No.560

Number of Pages:

Status:

Not Peer Reviewed

Access rights to Published version:

Open Access

References:

Andrews, M., Stewart, M.B., Swaffield, J.K. and Upward, R., (1999), ‘The Estimation of Union Wage Differentials and the Impact of Methodological Choices’, Labour Economics, 5, 449-474
Benito, A., (1997), ‘Public Sector Wage Differentials in Great Britain’, Warwick Economic Research Paper No 485, September.
Biddle, J.E. and Hamermesh, D.S., (1990), ‘Sleep and the Allocation of Time’, Journal of Political Economy, 98, 922-943.
Disney, R. and Gosling, A., (1998), ‘Does it Pay to Work in the Public Sector?’, Fiscal Studies, 19(4), 347-374.
Elliott, R.F., (1991), Labor Economics: A Comparative Text, McGraw Hill, London.
Gabriel, S.A. and Rosenthal, S.S., (1996), ‘Commutes, Neighbourhood Effects and Earnings: An Analysis of Racial Discrimination and Compensating Differentials’, Journal of Urban Economics, 40, 61-83.
Hamermesh, D., (1999), ‘The Art of Labormetrics’, NBER Working Paper 6927.
Henley, A., (1998), ‘Residential Mobility, Housing Equity and the Labour Market’, Economic Journal, 108(447), 414-427.
Newey, W.K., (1985), ‘Generalised Method of Moments Specification Testing’, Journal of Econometrics, 29, 229-256.
Thomas, J.M., (1997), ‘Ethnic Variation in Commuting Propensity and Unemployment Spells: Some UK Evidence’, U.C.L. Discussion Paper 97-02.
Zax, J.S., (1991), ‘Compensation for Commutes in Labor and Housing Markets’, Journal of Urban Economics, 30, 192-207.

URI:

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/1617

Request changes or add full text files to a record