Labour Market Externalities and Regional Growth in Sweden: The Importance of Labour Mobility between Skill-Related Industries

Ron Boschma*, Rikard H. Eriksson, Urban Lindgren

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

Boschma R., Eriksson R. H. and Lindgren U. Labour market externalities and regional growth in Sweden: the importance of labour mobility between skill-related industries, Regional Studies. This study investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows. In particular, it tests for the importance of labour mobility across so-called skill-related industries between 435 four-digit industries within 72 Swedish functional regions (1998–2002). Both the fixed-effect models and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimates demonstrate that a strong intensity of intra-regional labour flows between skill-related industries impacts positively on regional productivity growth, but less so on employment growth. Labour mobility between unrelated industries tends to dampen regional unemployment growth while a high degree of intra-industry labour flows is only found to be associated with rising unemployment.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1669-1690
Number of pages22
JournalRegional Studies
Volume48
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2014

Keywords

  • Agglomeration externalities
  • Labour mobility
  • Regional growth
  • Related labour market externalities
  • Related variety

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