Rikard Eriksson

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Umeå University

Using Swedish longitudinal micro-data, the aim of this paper is to analyse how regional economies respond to crises. This is made possible by linking gross employment flows to the notion of regional resilience. Our findings indicate that despite a steady national employment growth, only the three metropolitan regions have fully recovered from the r...

This article follows the industry employment histories of all individuals who at some point have been affiliated with the declining German or the dismantling Swedish shipbuilding industry during 1970–2000. We analyse the situation of the individual workers leaving shipbuilding, investigating the extent to which they were employed at all, tended to...

Related diversification has generated interest in policy (Smart Specialisation) and academic (regional branching) circles, linking path creation to regional capabilities and performance. We develop measures of occupational relatedness and complexity for local labour market areas in Sweden over the period 2002-12 to examine whether these constructs...

The present article creates a link between contemporary labour market polarisation and regional divergence and analyses the spatial patterns of labour market polarisation in Swedish municipalities during the period 2002–2012. The results show that the national pattern of labour market polarisation is driven by polarisation in clusters of previously...

The present article provides an initial systematic analysis of how social networks influence productivity in regional agglomerations. This is accomplished by means of matched employer–employee data for the entire Swedish economy for the period 1990–2008, allowing us to construct a weighted co-worker network with aggregated tie weights on the plant...

This paper uses register data and open vacancy data to determine if green industries require different skills than other employers. This is done by focusing on how the entry of the battery producer Northvolt changed the labour demand when establishing in Skellefteå (Sweden). Using data on all vacancies in Sweden 2016–2023 we analyse the skill- and...

Using a broad range of materials (media and interviews), we analyse the development of three green megaprojects in the two northernmost regions of Sweden. We find support for the presence of a strong ideological fantasy tied to a few “green heroes”, supporting the notion that the investments are the ultimate answer not only to climate crisis but al...

The local presence and composition of skills is commonly thought to have enormous implications for economic development. Yet, skills and the relations between them are notoriously difficult to pinpoint and measure. We develop a method that uses information available in Swedish job postings to measure the skill-relatedness of jobs and the skill-cohe...

SLU arbetar sedan 2019 med regeringsuppdraget ”Uppdrag landsbygd”, som syftar till att stärka forskningen om Sveriges landsbygder och främja samverkan mellan de aktörer som bedriver forskning och arbetar inom landsbygds- och regional utveckling i Sverige. En del i uppdraget handlar om att bistå landsbygds- och infrastrukturdepartementet med policyr...

Recent large investments in northern Sweden connected to the green transition – primarily within mining and manufacturing (fossil-free steel, batteries) – have led to substantial increases in local demand for labour. In a territory with low unemployment and a decreasing labour supply due to ageing and a history of net outmigration, there is a subst...

This report is an outcome of the Nordic ‘Strategies to Address Nordic Rural Labour Shortage project, which aims to fill knowledge gaps concerning strategies for addressing rural labour shortages, their regional variations, and the sectors particularly affected by such shortages. The project time frame is 2022–2024. In order to fulfil the project’s...

This paper explores how the network structure of local inter-industry labour flows relates to regional economic resilience across 72 local labour markets in Sweden. Drawing on recent advancements in network science, we stress test these networks against the sequential elimination of their nodes, finding substantial heterogeneity in network robustne...

Resilience has gathered significant attention from economic geographers, yet their focus has primarily centered on economic outcomes at the regional level. This approach often overlooks the intricate micro-processes and lived experiences during crises, assuming that individual resilience can be understood solely through macro-level economic observa...

The local presence and composition of skills is commonly thought to have enormous implications for economic development. Yet, skills and the relations between them are notoriously difficult to pinpoint and measure. We develop a method that uses information available in Swedish job postings to measure the skill-relatedness of jobs and the skill-cohe...

This document lays out the background for the research program “A promised land? Drivers, challenges and opportunities related to the (green) industrialization of Northern Sweden,” (nr. M22-0029) awarded by the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond’s in 2022. The document summarizes work in progress and may therefore be updated and republished in diffe...

Despite increasing calls on the state to manage major challenges, in the existing literature, the state – and public sector activities more generally – tends to be overlooked as an agent of regional change. The role of public sector jobs is often taken for granted, with diverse empirical findings being strongly influenced by geography and time peri...

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...

This article examines the impact of establishing a large industrial manufacturing entity on employment and the labor market in a remote, sparsely populated part of Sweden, focusing on how it affects total regional employment because industrial policies aiming to attract investment and reignite employment in stagnating regions have been a central po...

This paper explores how the network structure of local inter-industry labour flows relates to regional economic resilience across 72 local labour markets in Sweden. Drawing on recent advancements in network science we stress-test these networks against the sequential elimination of their nodes, finding substantial heterogeneity in network robustnes...

Core objectives of European common market integration are convergence and economic growth, but these are hampered by redundancy, and value chain asymmetries. The challenge is how to harmonize labor division to reach global competitiveness, meanwhile bridging productivity differences across the EU. We develop a bipartite network approach to trace pa...

Low-wage jobs are often regarded as dead ends in the labour market careers of young people. Previous research focused on disentangling to what degree the association between a low-wage job at the start of working life and limited chances of transitioning to better-paid employment is causal or spurious. Less attention has been paid to the factors th...

In the present paper, we analyse the association between the skill composition of young firms and the firms’ subsequent survival. This is made possible by means of a matched employer-employee dataset from Statistics Sweden on a cohort of firms that started between 2001 and 2003. Our findings show that, compared to firms that exit, the firms that su...

The aim of this article is to analyze the contribution of social ties to moving to high-opportunity locations and assess whether their effect is more pronounced for low-income individuals as a compensation for economic resources. This is done by utilizing Swedish administrative data and by focusing on a wide range of relationships (observed directl...

Core objectives of the European integration are convergence and economic growth, but these are challenged by competition and value chain asymmetries within the common market. A difficult challenge for the EU is how to harmonize specialization of industries and countries to reach global competitiveness, and at the same time bridge productivity diffe...

A considerable proportion of jobs across labour markets of the Western world are low-wage jobs, while the number of "bad" jobs with deteriorating working conditions and task content is growing. This puts pressure on both successful and lagging regions as low-wage workers struggle to avoid getting priced out of urban areas, while diminishing economi...

This chapter assesses to what extent broadband internet access and social capital influence entrepreneurship in rural Sweden. The chapter combines a quantitative assessment of the relation between broadband access and the start-up rates of micro-enterprises in Swedish municipalities between 2007 and 2012 with a qualitative case study on Dutch lifes...

Automation risk prevails less in large cities compared to small cities but little is known about the drivers of this emerging urban phenomenon. A major challenge is that automation risk is quantified by work‐related tasks that allows for measurement through occupation, which is in turn implicitly related to local economic structure and to individua...

Denna rapport har utifrån nuvarande forskning om smart specialisering identifierat Värmlands, Dalarnas och Gävleborgs näringslivsstruktur och hur verksamheterna i respektive region är kopplade till varandra ur ett kompetensperspektiv. Detta är en central utgångspunkt för att utifrån nuvarande situation kunna förstå framtida utvecklingsmöjligheter u...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of low-educated natives (i.e. residents without a university diploma). Using the labour market competition theory, which argues that the labour market effects of natives depend on the skill set of immigrants, the paper addresses whether immigran...

Industry experience and home advantage can have a varying influence on entrepreneurial competitiveness, depending on the regional context. We use matched employer–employee data from Statistics Sweden to analyse new firm formation in rural, urban and metropolitan regions. The results suggest that industry experience has a positive effect on firm sur...

Social connections that reach distant places are advantageous for individuals, firms and cities, providing access to new skills and knowledge. However, systematic evidence on how firms build global knowledge access is still lacking. In this paper, we analyse how global work connections relate to differences in the skill composition of employees wit...

Social connections that reach distant places are advantageous for individuals and firms by providing access to new skills and knowledge. However, systematic evidence on how firms work up global knowledge access is still missing. In this paper, we analyse how global work connections relate to differences in the skill composition of employees within...

I april hade nästan 60 000 personer varslats i Sverige i samband med coronakrisen. Under rådande omständigheter önskas en ökad rörlighet mellan jobb. Men omställningen kräver att individer hamnar i relaterade jobb för att nyttja sitt uppbyggda humankapital. Varslad personal i en bransch kan sällan gå direkt över till bristyrken i andra branscher. I...

This article analyses if and when workers affected by economic destruction in the form of establishment closures move to more productive or newly started establishments in the region, become self-employed, leave the region or become displaced. Results from multinominal probit models show that the majority of these workers face destructive employmen...

Regions are increasingly trying to improve their chances to attract and retain graduates, and universities tend to be strategic resources in this process. Establishing new universities or increasing the number of students in the region does not always lead to a higher human capital stock because some graduates will migrate to regions with more and...

Our paper focuses on current trends in refugee migration and job polarization. In so doing, we assess the role of refugee migration in relation to institutional, technological and globalization factors in an effort to trace the factors underlying the growth of low-paying occupations in EU 15 between 1995 and 2017. Our empirical findings suggest tha...

In academia as well as in policy circles, entrepreneurial activities are placed at the focal point for regional development. However, geographical factors such as urbanization and peripherality are often neglected in this strand of research despite the increasing need for place-specific policies. The aim of this paper is therefore to analyse how st...

Den svenska ekonomiska geografin genomgår en snabb förändring. Allt fler tjänstejobb skapas i storstäderna. I takt med att industrijobben minskar bidrar det till färre jobb totalt sett utanför storstäderna. Det hänger samman med storstädernas ekonomiska mångfald: att tjänsterna växer fram i nära koppling till andra relaterade verksamheter. Många tj...

While the family may serve as a resource for entrepreneurs, it has been studied separately in different disciplines. In this paper, we combine the arguments on familial relationships (family firm literature) and skill variety (regional learning literature) to analyse how different forms of entrepreneurial family relationships (co-occurrences) facil...

This paper studies redundant workers’ industrial and geographical mobility, and the consequences of post-redundancy mobility for regional policy strategies. This is accomplished by means of a database covering all workers who became redundant in major shutdowns or cutbacks in Sweden between 1990 and 2005. Frequencies of industrial and geographical...

Using matched employer–employee data on roughly 429,000 workers made redundant from large plant closures or major downsizing in Sweden between 1990 and 2005, this paper analyses the role of the regional industry mix (specialization, related and unrelated variety) in the likelihood of returning to work. The results show that a high presence of same...

The aim of this paper is to introduce an organisational dimension to the discussion of knowledge flows and relatedness. We hypothesise that not only the degree of technological relatedness influence the extent of skill integration in a firm but also that familiarity with firm routines (intra-organisational proximity) should smoothen absorption. Lon...

There is extensive literature describing the mechanisms of economic growth, which has tended to occur in big cities. The emergence of knowledge economies has enhanced the importance of human capital—the success of companies is increasingly dependent on employees’ ability to transform their knowledge and skills into new products that can satisfy rap...

This paper uses a Swedish micro-dataset containing 2,696,909 hires during the period 2002–2006 to assess the impact of job-related mobility on plant-level performance. The analysis classifies new recruits according to their work experience and level of formal qualification, as well as by the region of origin and of destination. New hires are divide...

This paper explores the potential drivers behind uneven regional development in the context of employment growth in Denmark and Sweden. In particular, we are interested in the roles of urbanization, industrial change and the rise of the new economy as manifested in the growth of the two economies in 2002–2007. The aim of this paper is, therefore, t...

We demonstrate that multiple cognitive dimensions exist between employees in knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) and that these dimensions interact in their influence on plant performance. Knowledge and cognitive distance are measured as formal knowledge and industry experience. Pooled OLS regressions with year, industry, and region-fixed...

The mobility of workers is an important source of regional dynamics, but the effect of mobility on regional productivity growth is not straightforward, as some firms tend to win while others lose from mobility. In the present paper, we argue that the co-worker networks across plants that are established by labour moves are important for both local...

This paper explores the role of profit distribution in the restructuring of the Swedish paper and pulp (P&P) industry between 1945 and 1977. In addressing this issue, we will draw on the life-cycle theory and market imperfection arguments to examine whether the less profitable firms shared more of their profits as dividends, or remained on the mark...

This study empirically assesses the role of social proximity, defined as the concentration of family members (FM) in firms, on firm performance. Based on longitudinal micro-data for the period 1995–2010 connecting information on workers and their workplaces in the Swedish labour market, the effects of FM (parents, children, siblings and grandparent...

Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 15.11

Papers in Evolutionary Economic Geography (PEEG) 14.15

Following the impact on regional renewal and employment ascribed to rapidly growing firms (High impact firms, HIFs) this article argues that little is still known in economic geography and business studies today regarding the mechanisms influencing growth of such firms and, hence, the potential impact on regional employment. The aim of this article...

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether employment growth is faster in regions housing a university compared to non-university regions. We argue that universities per se are less likely to trigger externalities that facilitate employment growth. Instead we propose that it depends on the concentration of different skills in that particular regio...

This study investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows. In particular, we test for the importance of labour mobility across so-called skill-related industries. We make use of a sophisticated indicator that measures the degree of skill-relatedness between all industries, and we emp...

Creativity and talent are considered key-factors in regional development due to the connection between growth, city regions and human capital. To come to a deeper understanding on the relevance of recent amenity-driven theories and how they are related to employment and GRP at regional level, this paper analyses the influence of business-climate (b...

Recent research has elucidated the role of talents to explain urban growth differences but it remains to be shown whether urban dynamics, such as human capital and a mixed local population, can be linked to intra-urban employment growth. By use of a unique longitudinal database, we track the economic development through the lens of intra-urban empl...

För Umeå har utmärkelsen till kulturhuvudstad 2014 till stor del handlat om att bygga vidare på ett redan vitalt kulturliv, att försöka bli ännu bättre. Staden har genomgått snabba förändringar inför detta år, på ytan utan såväl som på djupet. Vad innebär dessa förändringar? Vad ska ett kulturhuvudstadsår vara och för vem? Kulturgeograferna Madelei...

Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) is receiving increasing interest from tourism scholars. EEG has proven to be a useful explanatory paradigm in other sectors, e.g., high-technology and creative sectors. There remains, however, a lack of theoretical discussion on evolutionary principles of economic change within relatively low-technology service...

This paper addresses how the composition of industry structures, skills and human capital is related to regional development in peripheral and central locations. We do this by means of OLS models to analyse the relationship between purchase power growth and employment growth between 2001 and 2008 as well as a selection of variables constructed via...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how previous experience and location of entrepreneurs influence the survival of new tourism firms. The paper departs from recent evolutionary economic geography advancements, highlighting the importance of routines and skills as well as location-specific knowledge for firm success. While having been well-...

By means of a unique longitudinal database with information on all plants and employees in the Swedish economy, this paper analyzes how geographical proximity influences the impact of localized spillovers and knowledge flows on the productivity growth of plants. Concerning the effects of spillovers, we show that the density of economic activities a...

By means of a unique longitudinal database with information on all plants and employees in the Swedish economy, this paper analyzes how geographical proximity influences the impact of spillovers and knowledge flows on the productivity growth of plants. Concerning the effects of spillovers, we show that the density of economic activities as such mai...

This article analyses the impact of skill portfolios and labour mobility on plant performance by means of a unique database that connects attributes of individuals to features of plants for the whole Swedish economy. We found that a portfolio of related competences at the plant level increases significantly productivity growth of plants, in contras...

This article analyses the impact of labour market-induced externalities on firm performance by using a unique database that connects attributes of individuals to workplaces for the entire Swedish economy. Based on the analysis of 256,985 workplaces, our results show that firms belonging to networks of local job mobility (i.e. ‘localized mobility cl...

The purpose of this thesis is to shed new light on the theorizations discussing the economic benefits of geographical clustering in a space economy increasingly characterized by globalization processes. This is made possible through the employment of a plant-perspective and a focus on how the relative fixity and mobility of labour influence plant p...

This paper aims to shed some light on the influence of geographical proximity on both intra- and inter-industry spillovers by elaborating on the geographical dimension of both localised spillovers and inter-firm knowledge flows. By means of a unique longitudinal micro-database with information on all plants and employees in Sweden, both plant-speci...

Following increased attention being paid to the importance of labour-market processes in relation to knowledge diffusion and learning, this study addresses the influence of agglomeration economies (localisation, urbanisation, and scale) on the propensity to change jobs between and within local labour markets. From the use of longitudinal individual...

This paper analyses the impact of skill portfolios and labour mobility on plant performance by means of a unique database that connects attributes of individuals to features of plants for the whole Swedish economy. We found that a portfolio of related competences at the plant level increases significantly productivity growth of plants, in contrast...