  We discuss the distribution of commuting distances and its relation to
income. Using data from Denmark, the UK, and the US, we show that the commuting
distance is (i) broadly distributed with a slow decaying tail that can be
fitted by a power law with exponent $\gamma \approx 3$ and (ii) an average
growing slowly as a power law with an exponent less than one that depends on
the country considered. The classical theory for job search is based on the
idea that workers evaluate the wage of potential jobs as they arrive
sequentially through time, and extending this model with space, we obtain
predictions that are strongly contradicted by our empirical findings. We
propose an alternative model that is based on the idea that workers evaluate
potential jobs based on a quality aspect and that workers search for jobs
sequentially across space. We also assume that the density of potential jobs
depends on the skills of the worker and decreases with the wage. The predicted
distribution of commuting distances decays as $1/r^{3}$ and is independent of
the distribution of the quality of jobs. We find our alternative model to be in
agreement with our data. This type of approach opens new perspectives for the
modeling of mobility.
