This paper examines the labor market outcomes of foreign-born individuals residing in Sweden who lose their jobs due to plausibly exogenous establishment closures between 2003 and 2018. Using geo-coded longitudinal employer-employee matched data and an event study design, we track workers three years before to five years after job loss. Results show that foreign-born workers are more likely to be displaced and suffer greater earnings losses and lower re-employment rates than comparable natives. We further find that urban locations work more in favor of displaced natives than foreign-born in dampening earnings losses, while geographic mobility lessens the immigrant-native earnings gap.

This paper employs a novel two-step approach to examine the link between early industry experience and later income. First, we use sequence analysis to identify the typical industry trajectories followed between 1992 and 2011 by forced migrants from the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR). Second, we estimate wage regressions for the period 2012–2021, using the assigned trajectory as the key variable of interest while accounting for both observed and unobserved individual characteristics. The results show that industry trajectories exhibit considerable stability over time, with manufacturing being the only industry identified as a stepping-stone to other sectors. Migrants who experience prolonged unemployment appear to face long-term consequences, earning lower incomes in future employment. By contrast, those who enter knowledge-intensive services tend to earn higher incomes, even after transitioning into lower-wage industries. Overall, the findings indicate a strong association between migrants’ earlier industry experiences and their later labor market outcomes.

We employ sequence analysis to explore the heterogenous labor market paths of entrepreneurial Iraqi immigrants in Sweden, a group of forced migrants whom we follow from their year of immigration (2006-2009) to 2019. Using both individual and geographic characteristics, our main objective is to analyze how neighborhood characteristics are associated with individuals' likelihood of following self-sufficient labor market paths, leading to an income large enough to support themselves. The results show that residing among self-employed co-ethnics is positively related to the engagement in own self-employment, while we find a negative relationship between neighborhood poverty and the likelihood of pursuing a labor market path leading to self-sufficiency. A novel finding is that having self-employed Iraqi neighbors is primarily associated with necessity entrepreneurs, who experience relatively long periods of non-self-sufficiency and limited participation in the regular labor market. As expected, the results show that highly educated and skilled individuals are more likely to follow self-sufficient labor market paths. Our findings thus encourage efforts to mitigate socioeconomic disadvantages, support necessity entrepreneurs, and enhance education levels in disadvantaged groups.

Much research has highlighted the significance of neighborhood effects on individual-level choices and outcomes. But it has proven difficult to disentangle the influence of those that an individual shares a residential space with from that of other peers, such as work colleagues and family members. Neighbors, work colleagues, and family members constitute different sources of information. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely personal and involves the processing of information about phenomena likely to be unfamiliar to most individuals. To examine the information effect of different peer groups we use microlevel data on COVID-19 vaccination in Sweden. We investigate the extent to which an individual's decision not to get vaccinated is influenced by the presence of other unvaccinated individuals in their household, workplace, or residential neighborhood. Our findings reveal that workplace peers tend to be most strongly connected to the decision not to get vaccinated. We also find that the role of neighborhood peers tends to be overestimated when we do not control for peers at home and at work.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how economic growth stimulates business-service providers to develop new service varieties, which, in turn, enhance the productivity of business-service buyers. This creates a coevolutionary process where service suppliers and customers interact, leading to an increase in the number of differentiated service offerings. We introduce a framework for local economies, wherein business-service sectors evolve in response to local demand potential, while non-business-service sectors grow based on each economy’s supply potential. Business service growth is more rapid in local economies with higher demand potential, while non-business-service sectors expand faster in areas where the business-service supply potential is greater. A key assumption is that business service firms operate in a monopolistic competition environment, where an increase in business-service capacity leads to an expansion in the variety of services offered. This, in turn, enhances the diversity of service offerings in municipalities with strong demand potential. Additionally, service providers not only deliver innovation-related information to client firms but also unintentionally disseminate knowledge within the region, fostering knowledge spillovers among firms.

This paper investigates neighbourhood characteristics related to an individual’s likelihood of getting the first COVID-19 vaccination and implementing official recommendations for the three-shot vaccination regime. We use full population-geocoded microdata for Sweden to measure important individual-level attributes and the marginalisation of their residential communities in terms of ethnicity, education and income. The findings show that the likelihood of getting vaccinated and obtaining all three recommended vaccine doses decrease for individuals residing in neighbourhoods with larger shares of marginalised residents. The effects also appear to be more pronounced if the individual themself belongs to a marginalised group.

Although the process of integrating immigrants into the labor market unfolds over many years, it is often modeled as outcomes (e.g. employment) at specific points in time. We contribute to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the sequence of events leading to active labor market participation of East African and EU15 immigrants to Sweden, whom we follow for up to 28 years. By combining the method of sequence analysis with binomial logit estimation, we can explain why individuals are sorted into different representative labor market sequences. A further contribution is that along the usual initial conditions (individual and geographic), we employ longitudinal micro data to find (1) representative sequences of movements between various types of neighborhoods and (2) an empirical estimate of individual ability, which turns out to be a strong predictor for immigrants entering an active labor market trajectory. Our results show that East Africans tend to reside in neighborhoods with a high degree of socioeconomic and ethnic segregation. Despite this, their labor market activity seems to be less influenced by neighborhood trajectories than EU15 immigrants. The labor market activity of EU15 immigrants and female East African immigrants is positively related to residing in less ethnically segregated and socioeconomically stronger neighborhoods. Our results are relevant to policy development since they point to the importance of the initial location of immigrants and their subsequent residential mobility.

We investigate whether an individual's information milieu-an individual's residential neighborhood and co-workers-affects the decision to get a COVID-19 vaccine. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely personal and involves the processing of information about phenomena likely to be unfamiliar to most individuals. One can thus expect an interplay between an individual's level of education and skills and the information processing of others whom with whom she can interact and whose decision she can probe and observe. Using individual-level data for adults in Sweden, we can identify the proportion of an individual's neighborhood and workplace who are unvaccinated as indicators of possible peer effects. We find that individuals with low levels of educational attainment and occupational skills are more likely to be unvaccinated when exposed to other unvaccinated individuals at work and in the residential neighborhood. The peer effects in each of these information milieus further increases the likelihood of not getting vaccinated-with the two acting as information channels that reinforce one another.

Wage employment is the most commonly observed type of employment after a spell of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of having been an entrepreneur on earnings after individuals exit. The question is how the entrepreneurship spell influences their value in the labor market? Based on a theoretical framework and earlier literature, our specific interest lies in how these outcomes interact with education level and the nature of the entrepreneurial venture. To investigate this question, we use longitudinal register data on firms and individuals in Sweden. The empirical strategy builds on matching techniques and estimations of earnings equations in a difference-in-differences framework with heterogenous treatment years. We provide evidence that there exists an earnings penalty when highly educated entrepreneurs return to wage employment. This effect is persistent throughout the time period that we observe. For individuals with lower educational attainment, we find no or weak evidence of a wage penalty. Our results suggest that the wage penalty for highly educated individuals operates through the depreciation of specific specialized skills valuable in wage employment.

We analyze the relationship between residence in an ethnic enclave and immigrants' labor market integration with respect to finding a first job in the receiving country. The analysis distinguishes between the size and the quality of the ethnic enclaves, where quality is measured in terms of employment rate among ethnic peers in the same neighborhood. We use longitudinal geo-coded registry data for two distinct groups of immigrants arriving in the Stockholm metropolitan area to investigate their initial labor market contact. The first group of immigrants moved from the Balkans in the early 1990s following the Yugoslavian war, and the second group arrived from the Middle East following the second Iraq War in 2006. We estimate the probability of finding a first job using probit regressions and complement the analysis with additional duration models. To draw causal inference, we use instrumentation that combines initial neighborhood variables with citywide variation over time. We provide empirical evidence that the employment rate of the respective immigrant group in the vicinity facilitates labor market integration of new immigrants. The influences of the overall employment rate and the share of conationals in the neighborhood tend to be positive, but less robustly so. Our results are consistent with the notion that the qualitative nature of an enclave is at least as important as the sheer number of ethnic peers in helping new immigrants find jobs.

The increased flow of individuals across national borders has led to a more diverse set of inhabitants in a region and a larger share of individuals with a foreign background in the labor force. Sweden is no exception, as it hosts a large share of foreign-born individuals due to its long history of both labor market-driven and forced migration. Integration into the labor market is vitally important for individuals with a foreign background, and the hospitality sector plays an important role since it employs a large share of employees with foreign backgrounds. By using this as a starting point, we explore the probability of becoming employed (out of opportunity or by necessity) within the hospitality sector for an individual with a foreign background. The results show that individuals with foreign backgrounds are more likely to be employed, both out of opportunity and by necessity, in the hospitality sector.

For some time now, the research focusing on Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS) has been very active. Observing that knowledge as a production factor is only becoming more and more pronounced, this focus is well-grounded. It is therefore important to examine how these knowledge-hubs gain and propagate their knowledge. We hypothesize that KIBS (as many other sectors) benefit from intra-industry knowledge spillovers facilitated by geographical concentration. Our focus is the innovative capacity of KIBS, which we measure through trademarks registered by KIBS firms. While there may be several mechanisms facilitating knowledge spillovers, we can identify local intra-sectoral labor mobility as one. Accessibility measures are used to assess the geographical attenuation of the spillover effects. Results show that the distance decay of spillovers is fast. Only local concentrations of KIBS seem to be of importance. Over longer distances, we instead observe negative consequences for trademarking, indicating possible spatial competition effects.

Innovationer i jordbruket och pa Sveriges landsbygder : En sammanstallning av Jordbruksverkets innovationsundersokning 2017

The present study analyzes the nexus among business growth, ownership structure and a firm’s local embeddedness – i.e., the involvement in a geographically bound social structure – in rural and urban contexts. This work combines regional economics with studies on family business and firm growth and uses a coarsened matched sample of privately held Swedish firms for the 2004-2013 period. The findings indicate that family firms benefit more than non-family firms from local embeddedness to achieve higher levels of financial and employment growth and that this effect is more pronounced in rural areas. Research implications are shared in the concluding section.

The present study analyzes the nexus among business growth, ownership structure, and local embeddedness—that is, the involvement of economic actors in a geographically bound social structure—in rural and urban contexts. This work combines regional economics with studies on family business and firm growth and uses a coarsened matched sample of privately held Swedish firms. The findings indicate that family firms benefit more than nonfamily firms from local embeddedness and as such they achieve higher levels of growth and that this effect is more pronounced in rural areas. Research implications are shared in the Conclusion section.

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale GeografieVolume 109, Issue 3 p. 329-331 Introduction Dossier on the Geography of Ageing and the Economy Johan Klaesson, Johan Klaesson johan.klaesson@ju.se Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics (CEnSE), Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden and Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm, SwedenSearch for more papers by this author Johan Klaesson, Johan Klaesson johan.klaesson@ju.se Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics (CEnSE), Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden and Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm, SwedenSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 June 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/tesg.12319Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume109, Issue3Special Issue: Dossier: Ageing and the EconomyJuly 2018Pages 329-331 RelatedInformation

This paper introduces a model framework which identifies the economic activity of each local economy (location) and observes the time distance between each pair of locations. Time distance for interaction inside local economies is taken as reference. Two models of location patterns are formulated on the basis of principles adhering to new economic geography (NEG). The first model describes how business service firms (classified into three levels of knowledge intensity) select locations with a favorable demand potential, depicting a location’s access to customer demand. The second model takes the location of business-service supply as given and describes how other firms select locations with a favorable supply potential, depicting the access to business-service supply. In order to calculate each location’s demand and supply potentials we need distance-decay parameters for interaction outside the local economy. When estimating the two models we develop an approach where the distance-decay (time sensitivity) parameters are determined endogenously as an integral part of estimating location choice parameters. The exercise can be appreciated as a test of NEG principles.

Who works longer – and why? This paper investigates the characteristics of people that stay longer in the workforce, even beyond the time they are eligible to retire. In our regional analysis, we use an 11‐year balanced panel of 290 Swedish regions. In the individual analysis, we use a large individual level panel to apply Cox proportional hazard estimates on ‘risk’ of entering retirement. Our results show a large gender difference: women tend to retire earlier than men. Between employees and entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs retire later. People in larger regions tend to retire later. Higher house prices, and the share of small firms in a region correlate with a lower likelihood of retirement. The local tax rate and the share of blue‐collar workers in a region is significantly related to lower retirement age. A high average wage, commuting intensity, and high human capital in a region is associated with later retirement.

The hospitality industry is a rapidly growing revenue generator in many countries and is becoming economically important for generating employment and for integrating of immigrants into the labor market. As an industry where firms face fierce competition, it is important for the firms to maintain their competitiveness by distinguishing themselves from others through continuous improvements and innovations. In this article, we investigate the determinants of innovation in the hospitality industry by analyzing survey data gathered from over 900 firms in Sweden. In the analysis, we differentiate between firm-specific and location-specific features. We conclude that the most important characteristics that explain innovation lie within the firm itself, not the location. These results provide important insights regarding firm- versus location-placed innovation policies.

Understanding more about the geographic location of leisure services is an important quest for research. For a long time now in developed economies, almost all employment growth is occurring within the service sector. In this sector, leisure services are fast growers. This means that the location of these services is important for economic growth and for employment opportunities of local market areas. Regional policy-makers time and again highlight these sectors as future engines of growth. This paper investigates the role of local demand in determining the availability and the scale of various types of leisure services. The analysis is motivated by observed regularities that indicate large and persistent interregional differences in the location and growth of leisure services. Based on a New Economic Geography framework, we investigate the role of local and regional demand for the size of leisure services in geographically separate markets in Sweden. We use data for 290 Swedish municipalities for the period 2002-2013 and run year-municipality fixed-effects regressions. Our main findings suggest a strong dependency on local demand, and less on the demand originating from other regions.