This stage asks whether people who moved out of expensive cities kept their high-wage city jobs, the efficiency counterpart to the housing-cost harm. It is scoped rather than estimated.

Variables

  • Residence-to-workplace decoupling (pending): whether a person lives in a different area from the one they work in.
  • Mover wage (pending): a mover’s pay before and after relocating, to test whether the productive match survives the move.
  • Commute and housing cost (pending): the change in commuting distance and housing cost around a move.
  • Local employment multiplier (pending): the knock-on effect of movers’ spending on jobs in receiving and sending areas.

Data source

Intended sources: the Census 2021 workplace and working-from-home tables, which show where people live against where they work, and the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which follows the same people over time. The Census tables are public; the longitudinal microdata are held under secure access with a long lead time.

Summary statistics of the analysis variables

This stage is planned. It requires external microdata that are not yet acquired, so descriptive statistics are pending.

Method

Planned: an event study of movers, testing whether the wage holds while the commute lengthens and housing cost falls, together with local-multiplier regressions on receiving and sending areas.