August 2020

IZA DP No. 13642: Delineating Functional Labour Market Areas with Estimable Classification Stabilities

We describe an unsupervised method for delineating functional labour market areas (LMAs) in national commuting networks. Our method uses the Louvain algorithm, which we extend to support top-down hierarchical LMA classification and estimable classification stabilities. We demonstrate our method using historical Census commuting data from New Zealand.