A Nonparametric Analysis of Regional Unemployment Dynamics in Britain.

This article estimates the probability distribution of relative county unemployment in Britain for the years 1981-95. The authors find that the distribution is unimodal in all years, with a falling variance between 1989 and 1994. They use bootstrap methods to determine critical values for the two tails of the distribution and analyze intradistribution dynamics. The authors calculate transition probabilities and find that the probability of leaving any given state is very low. They also find that high (low) unemployment regions have a higher probability of entering a state of lower (higher) unemployment than a state of higher (lower) unemployment.