Edinburgh Napier University

  The ability or willingness of unemployed people to travel further to a new job will affect the level of mismatch between job seekers and jobs (Brueckner and Martin 1997; Gabriel and Rosenthal, 1996; Holzer, 1991). Empirical evidence suggests that a range of socio-economic factors affect the length of time that job seekers are willing to commute to a new job (McQuaid et al, 2001). However, while there is considerable research into the travel-to-work times of those already in work there is limited research on the potential maximum journey to work for unemployed people seeking work. This paper seeks to identify and examine a range of personal, demographic and spatial factors that influence the time that unemployed job seekers would be willing to spend travelling to work if they could obtain employment.
In Section 2 existing evidence on factors affecting commuting time is reviewed. Section 3 sets out a theoretical model of the attitudes of unemployed job seekers towards the time they would be prepared to commute to a new job. Section 4 presents the results of a factor analysis of characteristics of unemployed job seekers and their attitude towards travel-to-work times. Section 5 presents the conclusions