Swedish labour mobility lab: structural change and mobility frictions on regional labour markets

Facilitating individuals’ transitions from declining to expanding jobs is a central aspect of a well-working labour market during structural change.

However, we still have limited knowledge in which ways people enter jobs that grow on regional labour markets, the main frictions stalling labour mobility, and conditions of work after having entered the growing jobs.The objective of this program is to establish the Swedish Labour Mobility Lab.

Drawing on Sweden’s world-class micro-data resources and by enabling long-term research collaboration in a dedicated inter-disciplinary research group, the Lab will produce scientifically cutting-edge and policy-relevant knowledge about the mobility structures on the Swedish labour market.The aim of the Swedish labour mobility lab is to combine contemporary datasets and historical insights to map the labour mobility structures into expanding jobs in Sweden to increase our understanding of the ways in which skills, gender norms and geography affect who enters expanding jobs, in which ways, and under which working conditions.

The Lab combines use of Statistics Sweden’s longitudinal register data on individuals and firms, analyses of big-data sets covering Swedish job ads recently made available by the Swedish Public Employment Service and exploration of historical datasets.The research of the Lab adds to an international inter-disciplinary literature concerned with labour market mobility and how it links to structural change.

This topic is important to both individuals, regions and countries, because in times of structural economic change, it is of prime importance that the process of labour mobility into growing jobs functions as smoothly as possible.

The Lab aspires to translate its research results into policy-relevant knowledge, with the aim to improve the functionality of the labour market, and especially to improve the conditions making labour mobility into growing jobs possible for an increasing number of people.