Labour market externalities and regional growth in Sweden: The importance of labour mobility between skill-related industries

Ron Boschma (), Rikard Eriksson and Urban Lindgren

No 1318, Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) from Utrecht University, Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Group Economic Geography

Abstract: This study investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows. In particular, we test for the importance of labour mobility across so-called skill-related industries. We make use of a sophisticated indicator that measures the degree of skill-relatedness between all industries, and we employ actual labour flows between 435 4-digit industries within 72 Swedish functional labour market regions to estimate how labour market externalities are related to regional growth in the period 1998-2002. Both our fixed effect models and 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 regional 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 regional unemployment.

Keywords: agglomeration externalities; related variety; regional growth; labour mobility; related labour market externalities; skill-relatedness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O18 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2013-10, Revised 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-geo, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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http://econ.geo.uu.nl/peeg/peeg1318.pdf Version October 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Labour Market Externalities and Regional Growth in Sweden: The Importance of Labour Mobility between Skill-Related Industries (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:egu:wpaper:1318

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