How Important is Access to Jobs? Old Question - Improved Answer

We study the impact of job proximity on individual employment and earnings. The analysis exploits a Swedish refugee dispersal policy to get exogenous variation in individual locations. Using very detailed data on the exact location of all residences and workplaces in Sweden, we find that having been placed in a location with poor job access in 1990-91 adversely affected employment in 1999. Doubling the number of jobs in the initial location in 1990-91 is associ­ated with 2.9 percentage points higher employment probability in 1999. The analysis suggests that residential sorting leads to underestimation of the impact of job access.Spatial Mismatch; Endogenous Location; Natural Experiment

The geographies of recruiting a partner from abroad. An exploration of Swedish data

International marriages are both a result and a driver of higher levels of global mobility and interconnectivity. Increasing ease of air travel for work and leisure, rising numbers of individuals studying, working and travelling abroad, and the emergence of international partnering websites have expanded traditionally local marriage fields – the geographical areas where people meet the partner – to global proportions. This expansion has increased the chance of meeting a potential partner from abroad resulting in an increase in international marriage migration. Recruiting a partner from abroad is surrounded by prejudice and stigma. ‘Knowledge’ about the characteristics of the individual ‘importing’ a partner from abroad is often based on anecdotic evidence and myths. In this paper we explore the factors that determine the probability that a native Swede recruits a partner from abroad. Along with various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the Swede we will pay specific attention to the geographies of marriage migration: the opportunity structure. This study uses longitudinal population data for the whole of Sweden, containing information on all individuals who lived in Sweden between 1994 and 2004. The results from multinomial logistic regression models shed a unique light on gendered and geographic patterns of partner recruitment.Migration; International marriage; Marriage migartion; Demographic characteristics; Socioeconomic characteristics; Globalisation; Sweden

Home, Job and Space : Mapping and Modeling the Labor Market

How does space affect individuals’ outcome on the labor market? And how do we measure it? Beyond the notion of the labor market as a system of supply and demand, lays a society of individuals and workplaces, whose relationships are undeniably complex. This thesis aims to shed some new light on how to investigate and analyze the complex labor market relationships from a spatial perspective. In this thesis, five self-contained articles describe the spatial relationship between individuals and workplaces. In the first article, the official delineation of local labor market areas is tested against the delineation of labor markets for different subgroups. Differences in the regionalization are discussed from the subgroups’ and municipals’ perspective. In the second article, two sources of bias in the computation of local labor market areas, and suggestions how to reduce them, are presented. In the third article the spatial mismatch hypothesis is tested and confirmed on a refugee population in Sweden. In articles four and five, a new model for the estimation of job accessibility is introduced and evaluated. The model, ELMO, is created to answer to the need for a new accessibility measure to be used in spatial mismatch related research. The usability of the model is validated through empirical tests, were the ELMO-model excels in comparison to the accessibility models it is tested against

Home, Job and Space : Mapping and Modeling the Labor Market

How does space affect individuals’ outcome on the labor market? And how do we measure it? Beyond the notion of the labor market as a system of supply and demand, lays a society of individuals and workplaces, whose relationships are undeniably complex. This thesis aims to shed some new light on how to investigate and analyze the complex labor market relationships from a spatial perspective. In this thesis, five self-contained articles describe the spatial relationship between individuals and workplaces. In the first article, the official delineation of local labor market areas is tested against the delineation of labor markets for different subgroups. Differences in the regionalization are discussed from the subgroups’ and municipals’ perspective. In the second article, two sources of bias in the computation of local labor market areas, and suggestions how to reduce them, are presented. In the third article the spatial mismatch hypothesis is tested and confirmed on a refugee population in Sweden. In articles four and five, a new model for the estimation of job accessibility is introduced and evaluated. The model, ELMO, is created to answer to the need for a new accessibility measure to be used in spatial mismatch related research. The usability of the model is validated through empirical tests, were the ELMO-model excels in comparison to the accessibility models it is tested against

Advances in the measurement of transport impedance in accessibility modelling

Accessibility is a key concept in both transport and urban planning. The key aims of transport policies, not only at the urban level but also at the supra-national (for example, European Union), national and regional level, are to improve accessibility. Accessibility is also a key concept that has become central to physical planning and in spatial modelling for more than fifty years. As measure of the relative nearness or proximity of one place and persons to all other places or persons, conceptually linked to Newton’s law of gravity, its origins can be traced back to the 1920s when it was used in location theory and regional economic planning (Batty, 2009). In his classic paper ‘How Accessibility Shapes Land Use’, Hansen (1959) was the first to define accessibility as a potential of opportunities for interaction and applied the concept to forecast employment developments in Washington D.C.. Accessibility is thus a key concept in planning and research but often a confusing one. Many different accessibility definitions and operationalisations in accessibility models and instruments have in the past decades been developed and applied by researchers from several academic fields (e.g., urban geography, rural geography, health geography, time geography, spatial economics, transport engineering) and transport and urban planners (e.g., see for reviews Geurs and van Wee, 2004; Páez et al., 2012; Papa et al., 2016)