Abstract

In the last years, labour market research has again been increasingly concerned with determining local labour market effects on individual decisions. Recent methological papers from the UK or Austria are freeing themselves from administrative boundaries and are modelling local labour markets on the basis of observable and unobservable characteristics. The aim of this project is to investigate the effects of changes in local labour market structures in more detail by defining labour markets on a small scale and in several dimensions. To this end, we link geo-referenced online job advertisements from the job exchange of the Federal Employment Agency and administrative employment data. On the basis of this unique and new data set, we determine in a first step Local Job Accessibility (LJA) and in a second step we use exogenous shocks in individual dimensions of the LJA (such as the expansion of local transport infrastructure) to investigate the causal effect of changes in the LJA on individual labour market outcomes.