Unemployment Rate Dispersion within Australian Cities

In this paper we examine differences in the unemployment rates across regions within the five largest metropolitan areas in Australia using pooled regression analysis. We find that the level of within-city dispersion is positively correlated with the city-wide unemploymentrate and that dispersion tends to be higher for females than for males. The elasticity of Absolute Dispersion with respect to the unemployment rate is close to unity implying, as we find, that Relative Dispersion is not related to the state of the labour market. We argue that this reflects the fact that there is considerable persistence of relative rates across regions within each city over time.