A spatial mixed model for sectorial labour market data

A vast literature has been recently concerned with the analysis of variation in overdispersed counts across geographical areas. Most of the proposed modelling approaches have been discussed for the univariate case, and, only very recently, spatial models have been extended to predict more than one outcome simultaneously. In this paper, we extend the univariate semiparametric models with an explicit spatially structured component to the analysis of multiple, possibly correlated, spatial counts. The proposed approach is applied to modelling the geographical distribution of employees by economic sectors in the manufacturing industry in Teramo province (Abruzzo) during 2001.