The intra-household choices regarding commuting and housing

Intra-household commuting choices and local labour markets

“…Finally, the rho (q) statistic suggests a positive and significant correlation between the errors from the two equations in model (1); that is, between the unobservable factors associated with spouses' commute times. This positive correlation suggests that spouse commutes are complements rather than substitutes, which is in line with the US findings of Plaut (2006). The implication here is that journeys are jointly chosen to be longer (shorter) for both spouses.…”

“…Time is an appropriate measure here because it is directly related to the opportunity cost of commuting. In addition, Small and Song (1992) show that commuting times and distances are highly correlated, and Plaut's (2006) results for the main associates of couples' commuting outcomes are virtually identical for both time and distance. 10 We are limited to England and Wales due to some of the Local Authority level labour market data we use.…”

“…The influence is stronger the greater the differences in wife's earnings potential and commuting time among alternative options. Plaut (2006) looks at the commuting choices of dual-earner couples in the 2001 American Housing Survey, and finds that spouses' commuting distances are complements rather than substitutes, in that they tend to increase or decrease together (Surprenant-Legault et al, 2013, find a similar result). Mok's (2007) study of 1996 Canadian Census data shows that the location choices of two-earner households are more sensitive to the wife's earnings than the husband's, but only in households where children are not present.…”

Locational Choices and the Costs of Distance: Empirical Evidence for Dutch Graduates

“…At the same time, the commuting distances of older individuals are generally shorter than those of younger persons (Manaugh et al, 2010;Plaut, 2006;Susilo and Maat, 2007), supposedly since younger workers are more likely to have the energy required to realize lengthy, time-consuming commutes (So et al, 2001). …”

“…Correspondingly, Venhorst et al (2011) established that female college graduates are more likely than their male equivalents to cover large college-to-work distances when starting their first job after graduation. At the same time, females generally have shorter commutes than males (Crane, 2007;Manaugh et al, 2010;Plaut, 2006;Sang et al, 2011;Shuttleworth and Gould, 2010;Susilo and Maat, 2007), possibly due to the gender-specific allocation of domestic responsibilities (Rouwendal and Nijkamp, 2004;Schwanen et al, 2002;, or because women tend to attach a larger value on the disutility of commuting than men (So et al, 2001). We thus hypothesize that the distance between a graduate's place of study and workplace will be larger for female graduates and, since we expect women to have shorter commutes, we assume their college-to-residence distances to be longer than those of men.…”