Peter Haller (p), Daniel F. Heuermann

Annekatrin Niebuhr

According to urban economic theory, one key benefit of the local agglomeration
of workers and firms is that it insures workers against the risk
of unemployment due to a larger number of potential jobs. At the same
time, however, denser labor markets may expose workers to fiercer competition
from other job seekers. We use individual incidences of involuntary
unemployment between 1999 and 2009 to evaluate the effect of density and
accessibility in German municipalities on re-employment prospects over a
period of four years after displacement. Our preliminary results suggest
that negative competition effects from agglomeration prevail between regions
and reduce employment prospects of workers. Workers respond to
this by resorting to job opportunities in neighboring regions.

Annekatrin Niebuhr (p), Tanja Buch, Moritz Meister

Peter Haller

International migration gives rise to significant changes in the demographic composition of new host regions and neighborhood. These changes likely cause important social and economic effects in the regions of destination. A rapidly growing number of studies investigates the economic effects of cultural diversity of regions. Positive and negative effects of cultural diversity require that individuals are exposed to heterogeneity. When diversity at the regional level is concerned interaction assumes that different cultural groups are not perfectly segregated from each other. However, a specific degree of diversity at the regional level might involve quite different patterns of spatial clustering. We investigate the relationship between cultural diversity of the workforce measured at the city level and segregation at the neighborhood level in all German cities with at least 100,000 inhabitants. We calculate diversity measures and indicators of spatial clustering based on geo-referenced register data.