Geographical Mobility of Danish Dual-Earner Couples

In this paper, we analyse the empirical relationship between geographical residence mobility and geographical job mobility for Danish dual-earner couples. Based on register data from Statistics Denmark from 1999 and 2000, we estimate three probabilities, taking the interdependence between the relations into account: The probability of moving residence to another commuting area within the country, the probability of the husband changing job to another commuting area, and the probability of the wife changing job to another commuting area. The empirical findings strongly point to the importance of addressing the interrelationship between residence and job as well as the interrelationship between spouses. Especially moving residence makes a simultaneous job change much more likely than the other way around. Thus, region of residence seems to matter more for the determination of the region of work, than the work region matters for the determination of the residence region. Furthermore, although the model stresses the importance of looking at both spouses, we do not find marked differences between the men and the women. Thus, our results do not indicate that one spouse is more important than the other in determining geographical mobility.