Prof. Dieter Pennerstorfer (p)

This article provides causal evidence of the significant role ethnic networks play in facilitating labor market integration by reducing information frictions. Using full population geocoded employer-employee matched Swedish register data, we investigate how co-ethnic commuters influence the work location of immigrants for their initial employment. We argue that these ethnic peers transmit job specific information from their places of work to fellow ethnic peers within the same residential neighborhood who seek jobs. We find that each additional commuter from the same ethnic network increases a new immigrant’s probability of finding employment in a specific neighborhood by 2.3%.

Dr. Orsa Kekezi (p), Dr Johan Klaesson, Dr Sofia Wixe

Most of the existing literature and policy programs on immigrant economic integration focus on encouraging foreign-born individuals to enter the labor market. Relatively less attention is paid to understanding the long-term development of their work life. In this paper, we focus on the labor market outcomes of foreign-born individuals who have entered the Swedish labor market but lose their jobs due to firm closures. We use geo-coded longitudinal matched employer-employee data for all workers in Sweden who lose their employment during 2003-2018 and we follow them 3 years prior to - and 5 years post job loss. Our identification strategy relies on firm closure as an exogenous event unrelated to individual worker productivity. In addition, we employ a two-stage matching strategy to ensure the comparability of treated workers and the control group. First, the results indicate that foreign-born workers are more likely to be affected by displacement than comparable natives. In addition, relying on event study analysis, we find that they are more negatively affected by job loss, with lower future earnings and lower probability of getting a new job. In the second part of the paper, we analyze the underlying mechanisms behind these findings, with a specific focus on the role of geography and geographical mobility in mitigating or exacerbating the negative effects of job loss.

Dr. Roberto Dellisanti (p), Prof. Giovanni Perucca

Large cities are often portrayed as uniformly progressive, yet this “progressive-city” narrative embeds sharp divides between neighbourhoods, including “left-behind” areas marked by socio-economic disadvantage and disengagement. Building on this insight, the paper exploits a unique electoral setting: the Italian abrogative referendums held on June 2025. Unlike typical studies that infer issue preferences indirectly through party vote shares, this consultation functions as a cleaner, issue-specific signal because it directly asked voters to take positions on two policy domains commonly associated with progressive agendas—workers’ protections and migrant inclusion—within a single electoral event.
The referendums comprised four questions on labour regulation to increase workers’ protection and one question on citizenship that proposed reducing the legal residence requirement for non‑EU adults from ten to five years. While none of the referendums reached the validity quorum (turnout around 30%), the vote remains empirically salient for analysing spatial variation in policy preferences.
The analysis adopts large cities’ neighbourhoods as the unit of observation to study the spatial distribution of multidimensional progressivism, i.e. the simultaneous occurrence of pro‑migrant attitudes and pro‑labour attitudes. Our findings reveal a strong polarization of preferences for migration and labour within cities.