Gergo Toth (p), Zoltan Elekes, Rikard Eriksson, Dieter Kogler

Femke Cnossen

The existence of skill-relatedness stems from our labour market behaviour. The nature of the labour flows estimated in this way is crucial to understand in many areas, but surprisingly little is known about the geographical and socio-economic aspects of the formation of the skills network. A deep-rooted social structure underlies the creation and persistence of links between industries, occupations, or technologies. In practice, mainstream estimation methods mask such regional differences. Most research on skill linkages usually aggregates or averages data across industries and regions. These simplifications, however, hide some critical information about the underlying structure of the skills that the labour flow network is trying to capture.
Moreover, simplification is a waste of information and compromises the internal validity of the research by systematically under- or even over-measuring linkages for specific labour market groups or regions. In this paper, we use models from information theory to explore the geographical fragmentation and heterogeneity of Swedish labour market regions. The results show significant variance between the different types of regions; the lower the population density of a region, the more it differs from the national pattern. We also find that the differences are even more pronounced when we decompose the patterns by social and economic segments such as immigrant status, gender, and level of education. We believe our findings help calibrate policy interventions better, mainly when they target a specific region or a particular labour market group.

Elena Heller (p)

Gergo Toth

Ample research exists on the effect of immigration on a variety of outcomes such as natives’ wages, or their employment. Yet, so far we know little about the effect of immigration on natives’ chances to climb the social ladder. Studying this topic is inherently endogenous as research has shown that immigrants tend to settle in places with higher upward mobility (Abramitzky, Boustan, et al., 2019). Thus, analysing this question using the standard OLS approach would produce bias results due to the location choices of migrants. To fully account for this endogeneity, an exogenous shock to immigration is needed.
Such a shock was caused by the 1920s immigration restrictions in the US. These policies ended the Age of Mass Migration by drastically reducing the number of incoming migrants, as the US census shows. However, the severity of the restrictions varied depending on origin countries. This meant not all counties within the US were equally affected by the measures. Less changed for counties with either few immigrants in general or with a large share of migrants coming from less restricted countries such as Germany or Ireland. By exploiting this impact heterogeneity in a difference-in-differences setup, this paper sheds light on the causal relationship between immigration and natives’ social mobility. This policy shock has been used and researched in the past in other migration-related studies (Abramitzky, Ager, et al., 2019; Cornejo-Costas & Morrison, forthcoming; Moser & San, 2020; Tabellini, 2020). It lends itself well to addressing the challenge of endogeneity which such a study entails.
To do so, I use full count data from the US census from 1850-1940. I first relate the rank of the occupational outcomes of native men in the national distribution to that of their fathers’. In a second step, I use this measure of social mobility as outcome variable in the difference-in-differences setup. This allows me to test whether Americans living in counties that were greater affected by the immigration restrictions had a changed probability for intergenerational upward mobility.

Femke Cnossen (p), Sierdjan Koster

Elena Heller

The health care sector is one of the largest sectors in many European countries, as well as one with the tightest labour market conditions: the ageing population and increased longevity increases demand for care and thus for employees. At this backdrop, this study assesses the careers of health care workers. It does so in two primary dimensions: transitions within individual careers, and urban-rural differences across careers. In the first, we use register data to provide an understanding of the in- and outflow of detailed health care sectors in the Netherlands, which presents a picture of the labour market dynamics that underlie the current shortage of health care professionals. Although the empirical setting is within the health care sector, the study argues in a more general sense how a career perspective focusing on transitions is helpful in understanding and addressing labour market shortages. The geographical dimension of the analysis focuses on rural areas. The rural population is generally older, increasing demand for care in these areas. At the same time, the centralization of care typically pushes (larger) care facilities away from the most rural areas. As such, understanding the dynamics in labour shortages in a geographical context is important information for policy makers. For our analysis, we draw on individual career data that spans the entirety of the Dutch labour market. It holds detailed information on educational background, job mobility and residential mobility. In addition, it has socio-economic indicators including wage as well as demographic characteristics.