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We employ geocoded data to explore the effects of ethnic enclaves in Swedish cities on the propensity of Middle Eastern immigrants to transcend from having no employment to self-employment. We demonstrate a robust tendency for immigrants to leave non-employment for self-employment if many co-ethnic peers in the enclave are business owners, while we observe weak effects emanating from business owners in other groups. Net of these effects, overall enclave size, measured by the local concentration of co-ethnic peers, has a negative influence on the propensity for a non-employed immigrant to become self-employed. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. open access

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.

We argue that so-called geographies of discontent work within regional hierarchies in a spatial continuum, whereas the previous literature has mainly invoked dichotomous divides, such as core-periphery or the North-South. A place’s relation to surrounding communities and regions remains an understudied topic. We analyse the municipal distribution of electoral support for Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna, SD) in the 2014 and 2018 Swedish national general elections. We show that higher accessibility to other large municipalities within the same region, as well as being surrounded by relatively larger neighbouring regions, is associated with further support for SD. The within-region associations are only reliably identified among the urban group.

Funder: University of Cambridge, 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 aimed to measure the psychosocial status and quality of life in mothers of babies with infantile colic (IC).

This paper aims to provide a brief review of the much neglected ‘dark side’ of social capital. To highlight the contextual nature of social capital by way of examples from different geographies, we draw attention to the potentially detrimental effects associated with the concept. A significant body of literature addresses the advantages of being connected to various types of social bridges and bonds. While emphasising the ‘bright side’ of social capital, that literature pays limited attention to the negative attributes of social ties and their potentially detrimental effects on a number of social and economic outcomes. Although it is not reasonable to establish a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ social capital, it is possible to conceptualise such negative attributes in the light of the existing literature, in which the context-dependent nature of social capital is accentuated. We focus on two critical questions: (i) Why is it essential to address the contextual nature of social capital? (ii) How could geography come into play?

The purpose of this study is to analyse the spatial pattern and the post-entry performance of tourism businesses in the Italian insular regions of Sardinia and Sicily. Using geo-referenced micro-data for the period 2011-2014, we explore the spatial distribution of ac-commodation firms in the two insular regions, and then compare the coastal and inland areas of the two regions. We observe a higher dispersion of firms in Sardinia than in Sicily; the latter, however having a higher concentration of firms in coastal and urban areas. We do not find significant differences in survival probability across the two insular regions but we do detect significant differences be-tween coastal and inland areas in Sicily.