Much research has highlighted the significance of neighborhood effects on individual-level choices and outcomes. But it has proven difficult to disentangle the influence of those that an individual shares a residential space with from that of other peers, such as work colleagues and family members. Neighbors, work colleagues, and family members constitute different sources of information. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely personal and involves the processing of information about phenomena likely to be unfamiliar to most individuals. To examine the information effect of different peer groups we use microlevel data on COVID-19 vaccination in Sweden. We investigate the extent to which an individual's decision not to get vaccinated is influenced by the presence of other unvaccinated individuals in their household, workplace, or residential neighborhood. Our findings reveal that workplace peers tend to be most strongly connected to the decision not to get vaccinated. We also find that the role of neighborhood peers tends to be overestimated when we do not control for peers at home and at work.

We employ sequence analysis to explore the heterogenous labor market paths of entrepreneurial Iraqi immigrants in Sweden, a group of forced migrants whom we follow from their year of immigration (2006-2009) to 2019. Using both individual and geographic characteristics, our main objective is to analyze how neighborhood characteristics are associated with individuals' likelihood of following self-sufficient labor market paths, leading to an income large enough to support themselves. The results show that residing among self-employed co-ethnics is positively related to the engagement in own self-employment, while we find a negative relationship between neighborhood poverty and the likelihood of pursuing a labor market path leading to self-sufficiency. A novel finding is that having self-employed Iraqi neighbors is primarily associated with necessity entrepreneurs, who experience relatively long periods of non-self-sufficiency and limited participation in the regular labor market. As expected, the results show that highly educated and skilled individuals are more likely to follow self-sufficient labor market paths. Our findings thus encourage efforts to mitigate socioeconomic disadvantages, support necessity entrepreneurs, and enhance education levels in disadvantaged groups.

This paper employs a novel two-step approach to examine the link between early industry experience and later income. First, we use sequence analysis to identify the typical industry trajectories followed between 1992 and 2011 by forced migrants from the Former Yugoslav Republic (FYR). Second, we estimate wage regressions for the period 2012-2021, using the assigned trajectory as the key variable of interest while accounting for both observed and unobserved individual characteristics. The results show that industry trajectories exhibit considerable stability over time, with manufacturing being the only industry identified as a stepping-stone to other sectors. Migrants who experience prolonged unemployment appear to face long-term consequences, earning lower incomes in future employment. By contrast, those who enter knowledge-intensive services tend to earn higher incomes, even after transitioning into lower-wage industries. Overall, the findings indicate a strong association between migrants' earlier industry experiences and their later labor market outcomes.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how economic growth stimulates business-service providers to develop new service varieties, which, in turn, enhance the productivity of business-service buyers. This creates a coevolutionary process where service suppliers and customers interact, leading to an increase in the number of differentiated service offerings. We introduce a framework for local economies, wherein business-service sectors evolve in response to local demand potential, while non-business-service sectors grow based on each economy's supply potential. Business service growth is more rapid in local economies with higher demand potential, while non-business-service sectors expand faster in areas where the business-service supply potential is greater. A key assumption is that business service firms operate in a monopolistic competition environment, where an increase in business-service capacity leads to an expansion in the variety of services offered. This, in turn, enhances the diversity of service offerings in municipalities with strong demand potential. Additionally, service providers not only deliver innovation-related information to client firms but also unintentionally disseminate knowledge within the region, fostering knowledge spillovers among firms.

This paper investigates neighbourhood characteristics related to an individual’s likelihood of getting the first COVID-19 vaccination and implementing official recommendations for the three-shot vaccination regime. We use full population-geocoded microdata for Sweden to measure important individual-level attributes and the marginalisation of their residential communities in terms of ethnicity, education and income. The findings show that the likelihood of getting vaccinated and obtaining all three recommended vaccine doses decrease for individuals residing in neighbourhoods with larger shares of marginalised residents. The effects also appear to be more pronounced if the individual themself belongs to a marginalised group.

Although the process of integrating immigrants into the labor market unfolds over many years, it is often modeled as outcomes (e.g. employment) at specific points in time. We contribute to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the sequence of events leading to active labor market participation of East African and EU15 immigrants to Sweden, whom we follow for up to 28 years. By combining the method of sequence analysis with binomial logit estimation, we can explain why individuals are sorted into different representative labor market sequences. A further contribution is that along the usual initial conditions (individual and geographic), we employ longitudinal micro data to find (1) representative sequences of movements between various types of neighborhoods and (2) an empirical estimate of individual ability, which turns out to be a strong predictor for immigrants entering an active labor market trajectory. Our results show that East Africans tend to reside in neighborhoods with a high degree of socioeconomic and ethnic segregation. Despite this, their labor market activity seems to be less influenced by neighborhood trajectories than EU15 immigrants. The labor market activity of EU15 immigrants and female East African immigrants is positively related to residing in less ethnically segregated and socioeconomically stronger neighborhoods. Our results are relevant to policy development since they point to the importance of the initial location of immigrants and their subsequent residential mobility.

We investigate whether an individual's information milieu-an individual's residential neighborhood and co-workers-affects the decision to get a COVID-19 vaccine. The decision to accept or refuse a vaccine is intensely personal and involves the processing of information about phenomena likely to be unfamiliar to most individuals. One can thus expect an interplay between an individual's level of education and skills and the information processing of others whom with whom she can interact and whose decision she can probe and observe. Using individual-level data for adults in Sweden, we can identify the proportion of an individual's neighborhood and workplace who are unvaccinated as indicators of possible peer effects. We find that individuals with low levels of educational attainment and occupational skills are more likely to be unvaccinated when exposed to other unvaccinated individuals at work and in the residential neighborhood. The peer effects in each of these information milieus further increases the likelihood of not getting vaccinated-with the two acting as information channels that reinforce one another.

Wage employment is the most commonly observed type of employment after a spell of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of having been an entrepreneur on earnings after individuals exit. The question is how the entrepreneurship spell influences their value in the labor market? Based on a theoretical framework and earlier literature, our specific interest lies in how these outcomes interact with education level and the nature of the entrepreneurial venture. To investigate this question, we use longitudinal register data on firms and individuals in Sweden. The empirical strategy builds on matching techniques and estimations of earnings equations in a difference-in-differences framework with heterogenous treatment years. We provide evidence that there exists an earnings penalty when highly educated entrepreneurs return to wage employment. This effect is persistent throughout the time period that we observe. For individuals with lower educational attainment, we find no or weak evidence of a wage penalty. Our results suggest that the wage penalty for highly educated individuals operates through the depreciation of specific specialized skills valuable in wage employment.

The relevance of residential segregation and ethnic enclaves for labor market sorting of immigrants has been investigated by a large body of literature. Previous literature presents competing arguments and mixed results for the effects of segregation and ethnic concentration on various labor market outcomes. The geographical size of the area at which segregation and/or ethnic concentration is measured, however, is left to empirical work to determine. We argue that ethnic concentration and segregation should not be used interchangeably, and more importantly, the geographical area at which they are measured relates directly to different mechanisms. We use a probabilistic approach to identify the likelihood that an immigrant is employed or a self-employed entrepreneur in the year 2005 with respect to residential segregation and ethnic concentration at the level of the neighborhood, municipality, and local labor market level jointly. We study three groups of immigrants that accentuate the differences between forced and pulled migrants: (i) the first 15 member states of European Union (referred to as EU 15) and the Nordic countries, (ii) the Balkan countries, and (iii) countries in the Middle East. We find that ethnic enclaves, proxied by ethnic concentration at varying levels, indicate mixed results for the different immigrant groups we study, both for their employment and entrepreneurship probability, whereas residential segregation has a more uniformly distributed result where its relationship to any of the two labor market outcomes is almost always negative or insignificant.

We analyze the relationship between residence in an ethnic enclave and immigrants' labor market integration with respect to finding a first job in the receiving country. The analysis distinguishes between the size and the quality of the ethnic enclaves, where quality is measured in terms of employment rate among ethnic peers in the same neighborhood. We use longitudinal geo-coded registry data for two distinct groups of immigrants arriving in the Stockholm metropolitan area to investigate their initial labor market contact. The first group of immigrants moved from the Balkans in the early 1990s following the Yugoslavian war, and the second group arrived from the Middle East following the second Iraq War in 2006. We estimate the probability of finding a first job using probit regressions and complement the analysis with additional duration models. To draw causal inference, we use instrumentation that combines initial neighborhood variables with citywide variation over time. We provide empirical evidence that the employment rate of the respective immigrant group in the vicinity facilitates labor market integration of new immigrants. The influences of the overall employment rate and the share of conationals in the neighborhood tend to be positive, but less robustly so. Our results are consistent with the notion that the qualitative nature of an enclave is at least as important as the sheer number of ethnic peers in helping new immigrants find jobs.