AIMS:The existing literature lacks sufficient evidence concerning the role of personality traits in oral behaviour and their effects on oral health status (dental plaque, and dental caries) and dental visits. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between personality traits and oral health behaviour (OHB) in the adult Finnish population. METHODS:This study utilised data collected from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 individuals who participated in all the follow-ups (n = 1807). Data were collected during pregnancy and later during follow-ups conducted at 1 year, 7-8 years, 15-16 years and 33-35 years using questionnaires and clinical examinations. Oral health status and number of dental visits collected in the last follow-up were considered as dependent variables. The explanatory variables included personality traits, educational background, employment, annual income, and lifestyle choices. A recursive bivariate probit model was used to model oral health status (dental plaque, and dental caries) while considering dental care utilisation. RESULTS:Personality traits were associated with OHB (accumulation of dental plaque and regular dental visits). Individuals with a high degree of openness had a 13% lower probability of having teeth with dental caries. Similarly, highly neurotic individuals had a 5% lower probability of having teeth with visible dental plaque and also had a higher probability of dental visiting. CONCLUSIONS:Personality traits are associated with OHB among young adults Finns. Policies aimed at improving dental health education and mitigating common risk factors are essential to promote oral health.

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and the widespread shift to remote work, interest has grown in how these changes have affected online labor markets. We study individuals who were active in both the conventional labor market and an online labor market prior to this shock, and compare workers who were shifted from on-site to remote work in their main job with those who remained on-site. To provide insights into how changes in working conditions affect productivity in online labor markets, we utilized a unique dataset obtained from a prominent online labor marketplace. Our dataset contains several measures of worker productivity, which we analyze in conjunction with survey data collected from online workers regarding their experiences with conventional market changes. By combining these two sources of data, we are able to investigate the ways in which the pandemic-induced shift toward remote work has affected the productivity and behavior of online workers. We find that, first, the shift toward remote work during the pandemic has led to changes in the patterns of productivity in online labor markets. The transition toward remote work from home (WFH) decreased online productivity by 18

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated lockdown measures have been a shock to market systems worldwide, affecting both the supply and demand of labor. Intensified by this pandemic-driven recession, online labor markets are in many ways at the core of the economic and policy debates about their technological innovation, which could be used as a way of economic reform and recovery. In this work, we focus on crowdsourcing, which is a specific type of online labor. We apply a unique dataset of labor data to investigate the effects of online training, a policy that was provided to requesters by the platform during the COVID-19 period. Our findings suggest that workers indirectly finance on-the-job online training by accepting lower wages during the pandemic. By utilizing a difference-in-difference research design, we also provide causal evidence that online training results in lower job completion time and the probability of being discontinued. Our findings show that both employers and employees in our online labor context reacted to the pandemic by participating in online labor procedures with different risk strategies and labor approaches. Our findings provide key insights for several groups of crowdsourcing stakeholders, including policy-makers, platform owners, hiring managers, and workers. Managerial and practical implications in relation to how online labor markets react to external shocks are discussed.

In this article, we analyze how industry- and region-specific characteristics influence individual-level decisions on mobility within and between regions during the life cycle of the industry. Using uniquely detailed panel-type data from the Finnish high technology sector, our analysis demonstrates that the influence of different regional features varies for different types of job changes and labor mobility and also according to the industry life cycle. We find that the classic agglomeration-type arguments regarding labor search and matching only really operate in the early growth stages of an industry life cycle. These patterns change throughout the various stages of the industry life cycle, although in quite different ways according to different factors, and understanding how these patterns change helps to provide a richer understanding of the labor market roles of agglomeration and clustering.

The concept of resilience has been applied in several fields of academic research and has also grown in popularity among economists. The main contribution of this article is the systematic analysis and interpretation of the existing large body of resilience literature in economics by using topic modeling, a modern machine‐learning research method. The advantage of this method is that it offers a more in‐depth understanding of the themes in the resilience literature as opposed to the terminological classifications typically used in bibliometric studies. The results show that the identified topics are spread widely across different subareas of economics and deal with diverse themes, such as adaptation to climate change, stability of the financial system, and various types of shocks in regional economies. The findings reveal that the literature can be divided into two domains: one that deal with incremental changes occurring over a long period of time and the other dealing with unexpected, transient, and sudden changes. Furthermore, according to the results, well‐known, highly cited research papers combine knowledge from different fields. Policymakers seeking to support cutting‐edge research projects may benefit from this finding, as it emphasizes the need for policy measures to enhance cross‐fertilized research.

The European Union (EU) has recognized that universities and research institutes play a critical role in regional Smart Specialisation processes. Our research aims to identify thematic cross-border research domains across space and disciplines in Arctic Scandinavia. We identify potential domains using an unsupervised machine-learning technique (topic modelling). We uncover latent topics based on similarities in the vocabulary of research papers. The proposed methodology can be utilized to identify common research domains across regions and disciplines in almost real time, thereby acting as a decision support system to facilitate cooperation among knowledge producers.

The Oulu region, a globally recognized hub of mobile technology development in Northern Finland, provides a textbook example of how the various features of an innovation ecosystem can cause serious problems for regional development when a region faces a shock. The Oulu region is also an interesting example of how the effects of shock can be alleviated through creative actions and effective regional policy. In this paper, we develop a framework for analysing resilience using creativeness as the key element. We contribute to the literature by showing how this framework can be used in the operation and management of the regions hit by creative destruction types of shocks. We argue that the dynamic process that Oulu has gone through, in which obsolete and unproductive business activities have been replaced by new fields of technology and knowledge, can clearly be compared in many ways with Schumpeter's description of "creative destruction." We call this dynamic process creative resilience. We identify three elements as the core of creative resilience; knowledge creation, entrepreneurship and community spirit. Our paper will show how they materialized in the Oulu region.

This article focuses on the relationship between entrepreneurs' human capital and business competences and their growth orientation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Previous research has acknowledged that growth orientation is important in creating and developing a business. However, the research has been inconsistent and limited. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the qualities of the entrepreneur and investigate the role of growth orientation. Probit model analysis of our survey data shows that extensive experience as an entrepreneur-manager seems to decrease entrepreneurs' growth orientation. On the other hand, entrepreneurs' age, level of education and expectations of the industry's growth potentials have a positive influence on their growth orientation. Our findings reveal the factors that entrepreneurs themselves see as important for their growth orientation.

Much of the literature on agglomeration emphasises labour mobility between firms as a potential source of externalities. However, while there is a large literature on interregional migration, the empirical literature on the employment-mobility of workers within the local arena is surprisingly thin. Furthermore, there is almost no empirical evidence on the relationship between local and non-local employment movements, especially across industries. In this paper we analyse how agglomeration of the high technology industry as well as regional amenities affects labour mobility. In order to do this we employ panel data on the regional and industrial labour mobility of the Finnish high technology firms and regional economies on a period of 1991-2007. Analysing this dataset allows us to identify the roles which the structure of the high technology sector, regional economic and amenity variables have played both in the inter-regional and inter-sectoral labour mobility of high technology workers over the industry life-cycle. Our findings confirm that the structure of the high technology sector as well as regional economic and amenity variables have an influence on the migration decisions of the high technology workers, and their roles vary in within-region and across-region mobility. In addition, the effects of the variables seem to vary at different stages of the industry life cycle.

This article explores how the business skills that small and medium-sized entrepreneur possesses and value affect growth orientation in the context of business development. It focuses on the topic through a theoretical framework an entrepreneur and growth orientation. These two elements are key factors in growing and developing business and in strategic entrepreneurship (SE). SE balances two separate elements related to business development: advantage-seeking (AS) actions and opportunity-seeking (OS) actions. The findings of our exploratory quantitative study show that only the skills that entrepreneurs' value affect their growth orientation: the more entrepreneurs value a certain business skill or skills, the more significant they see their self-reported growth orientation to be. The findings further indicate the balance as strategic-oriented.

In this paper, we attempt to shed some light on how regional high-technology industrial structures and increased globalisation in business strategies combined with structures of knowledge and innovation networks and regional innovation policy can have a significant effect on a region's ability to react to changes in the global economic and technological environment. The aim is to provide a multidisciplinary view of regional development by combining not only the various views of the traditional agglomeration and regional innovation network literature but also the views about changing business strategies. We show, based on the empirical evidence, how the very specialised industrial and highly centralised structure of the innovation network together with regional policy choices can hinder a region's ability to cope with sudden changes in the global economic and technological environment.

In this paper we employ data on 156,000 workers working within the Finnish high-tech industries in order to identify the extent to which labour mobility between sectors and regions is influenced by the characteristics of the locality in which the worker works. With these data we are able to estimate different types of binary, multinomial and ordered logit models to capture different types of inter- or intra-sector or region employment mobility. As we will see the different categories of employment mobility are influenced by different factors such that we cannot simply talk about ‘labour mobility’, but rather need to be specific regarding each particular form of employment mobility. Our results show that urbanisation and industrial diversity are not just associated with greater intra-regional mobility, as is emphasised by the agglomeration literature, but also greater inter-regional mobility.

This paper contributes to the literature of regional economics by concerning the linkages between regional industrial structure and economic growth. In order to shed light on this debatable issue, we study the role of the high technology sector, especially its industrial structure in regional economic growth. Using data from the Finnish regions during 1994 to 2008, we find diminishing marginal returns to high technology diversity with respect to regional growth, once we control for other determinants of growth. Through this paper we hope to give our contribution to one of the central themes of current EU regional policy discussion, namely smart specialization.

This paper investigates the role played by the knowledge transfers fostering innovation in Finnish high technology industries. In particular, we examine the roles played by both face-to-face knowledge transfers and also human capital transfers between different types of agents and institutions in the promotion of innovation. In order to examine these issues we employ a unique innovation dataset which provides information about a firm's innovation performance along with information regarding the geographical and sectoral origins of a firm's recent labour acquisitions, disaggregated according to different types of agents and institutions. This allows us to develop proxies for inter-firm face-to-face knowledge exchanges and also human capital knowledge transfers. The analysis of these data allows us to identify the different roles which the geography of knowledge exchanges and labour markets between agents and institutions play in regional innovation processes.

This paper investigates the role played by the geography of labor inputs in the promotion of innovation. Knowledge can be transferred between firms by inter-firm interactions and inter-firm cooperation. In addition, knowledge can also be transferred between firms by human capital mobility. In order to examine these issues we employ a unique innovation dataset from Finland. This dataset provides information about a firm's innovation performance along with information regarding the origins of a firm's recent labor acquisitions. The origins of the labor are defined according to both the industry and the region. Analyzing these data allows us to identify the different roles which the geography of knowledge exchanges and the geography of labor markets play in the innovation process.

This article investigates the role played by one type of firm interaction, namely R&D cooperation, and also the acquisition of labor, in the promotion of industrial innovations. We employ a unique innovation dataset from Finland which combines firm specific information about the innovation performance of the firms along with their individual characteristics, as well as firm specific information regarding the origins of their recent labor acquisitions. Analyzing this data allows us to identify the different roles which the knowledge spillovers and labor markets play in the innovation process. Our results suggest that small firms are generally more innovative than large firms; R&D cooperation is an essential feature of innovation, but the variety of cooperation is of little importance; and labor acquisition appears to be only of limited importance for innovation.

This book examines the interrelations between entrepreneurship, industrial location and economic growth. Thus, it covers a wide range of topics, including: the economic impact of entrepreneurship; industry dynamics; growth and survival of firms; firm location and globalisation patterns; and agglomeration and growth. The chapters in the book demonstrate the need to adopt a broad perspective that combines insights from different strands of literature if we are to better understand these complex economic phenomena. In addition, the original empirical evidence from a range of different countries provides a sound foundation for developing appropriate guidance for policymakers.