Gender differences in commuting : Study with Swedish data

Abstract: Commuting is becoming more and more important in every day life in the world of complex labour markets. If for hundred years ago most workers lived less than one hour walking distance from their workplace, then today they commute daily outside the cities and villages they live. Often is it a trade off between unemployment and employment. The subject of this thesis is to investigate if there are differences in female and male commuting behaviour. Especially it studies to what extent their spatial interaction is affected by variables such as labour in origin municipality, jobs in destination municipality and the distance between these two. Gravity models are used, and six different versions are estimated. The commuting data used in thesis comes from SCB (Statistics Sweden) and data about travel time collected by the Swedish Road Administration. Commuting data includes 1 003 771 people in Sweden who commute to a job located in another municipality than he or she was settled. The results imply that men are less sensitive to distance between two locations. Moreover, the amount of labour in origin and the amount of jobs in destination have higher effect on male commuting.