Construction of a linked postcode district to regional-level dataset for Great Britain.

Abstract

A one-to-one link is developed between overlapping sub-regional entities using geographical tools newly available to the Economic Research Community. The aim of this project is to create a database exploiting the geographical variation in publicly available data, in order to better control for regional heterogeneity. The database covers the period 1995 to 2007, and includes regional identiers at the postcode district, Local Authority, NUTS3 and Travel-To-Work Area levels of aggregation. Roughly 160 controls are available to the researcher. This data could be used to provide new insights for Regional Policy Analysis. An example of an application of this resource in the context of unemployment duration can be found in (Ball and Wilke, 2009) for the UK.Regional data, Great Britain, Overlapping regional entities, Regional heterogeneity.