Exploring the Ties Between Commuting and Residence Change in Spain: An Analysis with Individual Data

This article discusses the determinants of two of the most significant types of workers’ mobility: travel-to-work commuting and changes in the place of residence. It explores, in particular, the extent to which these phenomena influence each other. Accordingly, two alternative models are estimated using the multinomial logit technique. The individual data used come from the Spanish Population Census of 2011, which allows updating previous works that did not take into account the effects of the Great Recession. A significant contribution of the paper is the use of labour market areas (LMAs) as territorial reference units. Each of these areas brings together closely linked municipalities in terms of commuting flows and are delimited by boundaries that are infrequently crossed in the course of such trips; two features which make them relevant for this analysis in contrast with the alternative of using administrative territorial units as the reference geography. The recodification of the census microdata by the INE according to this territorial reference makes it possible to differentiate between migrations (change of residence involving different LMAs) and simple residential moves within a given LMA (which therefore make a change of workplace unnecessary due to the specific accessibility conditions in the LMA). The results confirm that there is a significant link between both types of mobility (commuting and migration/ residential mobility) and, in particular, that changes of residence seem to move workers away from their places of work rather than shortening their commuting trips.