Labour mobility, related variety and the performance of plants: A Swedish study

Ron Boschma, Rikard Eriksson () and Urban Lindgren ()

No 809, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Section of Economic Geography

Abstract: This paper analyses the impact of skill portfolios and labour mobility on plant performance by means of a unique database that connects attributes of individuals to features of plants for the whole Swedish economy. We found that a portfolio of related competences at the plant level increases significantly productivity growth of plants, in contrast to plant portfolios consisting of either similar or unrelated competences. Based on the analysis of 101,093 job moves, we found that inflows of skills that are related to the existing knowledge base of the plant had a positive effect on plant performance, while the inflow of new employees with skills that are already present in the plant had a negative impact. Our analyses show that inflows of unrelated skills only contribute positively to plant performance when these are recruited in the same region. Labour mobility across regions only has a positive effect on productivity growth of plants when this concerns new employees with related skills.

Keywords: labour mobility; related variety; skill portfolio; plant performance; geographical proximity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R11 R12 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eff, nep-geo, nep-knm, nep-lab and nep-ure
Date: 2008-05, Revised 2008-05
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg0809.pdf Version May 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:0809

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Section of Economic Geography
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Tom Broekel ().