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A new co-authored article by Zoltán Elekes has been published in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society

 

Regional diversification and labour market upgrading: local access
to skill-related high-income jobs helps workers
escaping low-wage employment

 
Zoltán Elekes, Anna Baranowska-Rataj, Rikard Eriksson

 

Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society – Published: 07 August 2023

 

Abstract

This article investigates how the evolution of local labour market structure enables or constrains workers as regards escaping low-wage jobs. Drawing on the network-based approach of evolutionary economic geography, we employ a detailed individual-level panel dataset to construct skill-relatedness networks for 72 functional labour market regions in Sweden. Subsequent fixed-effect panel regressions indicate that increasing density of skill-related high-income jobs within a region is conducive to low-wage workers moving to better-paid jobs, hence facilitating labour market upgrading through diversification. While metropolitan regions offer a premium for this relationship, it also holds for smaller regions, and across various worker characteristics.

Keywords: skill-relatedness network, local labour market, low-wage workers, diversification and structural change, relatedness density

JEL: J21 – Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure J31 – Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials R11 – Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes R23 – Regional Migration; Regional Labor Markets; Population; Neighborhood Characteristics