Understanding Unemployment Rates in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Abstract

By July 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate had increased to levels not seen in 26 years, leaving millions of Americans out of work. By looking at factors associated with unemployment in the past, we can gain greater insight into the causes of unemployment today. This paper explores factors associated with unemployment rates across metropolitan areas in the United States in 2007. I investigated how the rate of unemployment is affected by various economic components such as economic diversity, housing prices, population, salary, and region. I found that population has a positive relationship on the rate of unemployment, that there is an interval in which increasing the number of manufacturing jobs will decrease the unemployment rate, and that wage and housing prices have an inverse relationship with unemployment rates.