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High labor turnover imposes costs on a firm and hinders the accumulation of human capital. In an increasingly competitive market, retaining competent employees is a necessity. To avoid excessive labor turnover, it is necessary to identify which characteristics influence career pathways for employees. Becoming employed and/or staying employed within a certain firm or sector is normally not binary, but rather should be studied as employment-related events within a career trajectory. The combination of the timing and the order of distinct events that form a unique career pathway for an individual can be studied by using sequential analysis. In this paper, we systematically identify the common career paths of individuals who work in retail or wholesale.

We investigate to which extent shopping centers are drivers of economic development by studying how distance to newly established shopping centers affects the performance of incumbent firms located in the suburbs of the three Swedish major metropolitan areas (Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö) between 2000 and 2016. We use a regression setup with 27,000 firm-year observations and explore the possible heterogeneity imposed on the results from two main elements of spatial economics theory: the size of the new retail area and the distance from the new retail area to the analyzed incumbents. We observe a clear difference in the direction of the effects of large versus small shopping centers. While competition forces are much stronger when large shopping centers make entry, yielding an average negative effect of 5% on incumbent firm revenue and 3% on firm employment, results indicate an opposite pattern for smaller shopping centers, with firm revenue and firm employment increasing by 4 and 3%, respectively. Moreover, we also observe that both agglomeration and competition effects attenuate sharply with distance from the new entrant, confirming one of the central premises of retail location theory. Finally, the results indicate that the geographical scope of the effects is much wider in the case of larger shopping centers, with the estimates becoming insignificant at about 9-10 km from the new entry, as compared to 3-4 km in the case of smaller retail centers.

The retail sector accounts for a large share of employment in many economies, and many young individuals regard the retail sector as a steppingstone in the labor market. As the retail sector comprises various types of employment and diverse tasks, those employed in the retail sector are able to transition across different roles. Retail firms, however, often experience high labor turnover, which is costly to firms. This paper addresses how the human capital of full-time retail employees relates to labor turnover. We study individuals working in the retail sector between 1990 and 2018 and analyze how their human capital is associated with their likelihood of remaining in the same establishment and/or in the retail sector at large. Results indicate that firm-specific human capital decreases the probability of quitting, while formal education has the opposite effect. Industry experience and specific retail education, however, decreases the probability of leaving an establishment.

This study shows that in Sweden, contrary to other European countries, refugees have been disproportionately placed in peripheral and rural areas with high unemployment and rapid native depopulation where the prospects for integration, both socially and economically, are poor. We explore and evaluate some potential reasons for this outcome. Factors such as an intimidating political and intellectual climate in favor of receiving large numbers of asylum seekers and immigrants and the economic support given by the central government to municipalities that accept refugees are not sufficient to understand the actions of rural local governments. Instead, we argue that Tetlock's seminal work on "expert political judgment" may provide a useful approach for understanding the seemingly irrational actions of local politicians in rural and peripheral municipalities.

The European Union officially proclaims to have a common refugee policy. However, the common treaties leave a great deal of discretion to the individual member countries, which allows them to regulate refugee migration while still upholding international treaties. Member countries have authority over border controls, the processing of asylum applications as well as economic benefits provided to refugees. We show that the differences in refugee flows are so extensive and systematic that the existence of a common EU refugee policy is debatable. The commitments made by the member countries are largely voluntary, and refugee policy is mainly determined at the national level. The discrepancies between the member countries strongly signal that the European Union may not be an optimal region for a common refugee policy. A refugee policy should instead be determined at the national level concordant with the regional and local level, where integration measures are implemented in practice. Meanwhile, the European Union can play an important role through refugee aid to afflicted countries, treaties with third countries, rescue actions in the Mediterranean and control of the external EU borders.

This article analyses the relationship between the size and the quality of ethnic enclaves on immigrants' labour market integration. Using exogenously defined grid cells to delineate neighbourhoods we find robust empirical evidence that the employment rate of the respective immigrant group in the vicinity (as a measure of enclave quality) facilitates labour market integration of new immigrants. The influence of the overall employment rate and the share of co-nationals in the neighbourhood tend to be positive, but less robust. We thus conclude that the quality is more important than the size of the ethnic enclave in helping new immigrants finding jobs.

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 explore the effects of neighborhood-level ethnic enclaves on the propensity of immigrants to use business ownership as a vehicle to transcend from labor market outsiders to insiders. We exploit an exogenously partitioned grid of geocoded 1-by-1 km squares to approximate neighborhoods, and match it with Swedish full-population data from 2011-2012 to study immigrants from the Middle East. We demonstrate a robust tendency for people to leave non-employment for self-employment if many members of the neighborhood ethnic diaspora are business owners, while we observe weak effects emanating from business ownership in other groups. Net of these effects, the overall scale of the enclave, measured by local concentration of co-ethnic peers, negatively influences the propensity to become self-employed. The results are consistent with the argument that it is not the scale, but the quality of local ethnic enclaves that influence labor market outcomes for immigrants.

There is an abundant literature on industrial ecology aiming at explaining the survival propensity of recently started firms. The majority of the contributions concentrate on the characteristics of the entrepreneur, the new firm or the industry. Only a small minority of the existing studies consider the influence of the location where the new firm has been started on survival probability. The evidence of the importance of location in the literature is mixed. However, only a limited share of these studies analyzes the importance of localized external economies of scale for the survival of newly founded firms. This relative lack of studies is intriguing since, for example, the ?new economic geography? theory empha-sizes the role that clusters of individual industries and of complementary industries within a distinct geographical area play in terms of proximity and network externalities. Thus, a basic motivation for this paper is that the absolute majority of business survival studies disregard the fundamental facts that every new firm is started in a specific location. A second motivation is the fact that in many of the studies that include spatial factors as explanatory factors the representation of these factors are often not ideal. A third motivation is that the representation of geographical space has not taken into consideration of the importance of the hierarchical structure of geographical space. The purpose of this paper is to test the influence of demand and supply conditions and general economic milieu in localities on the survival of newly founded firms while controlling for firm and industry characteristics and using a proper representation of the hierarchical structure of geographical space.

This paper investigates the determinants of the productivity of independent retail stores in Sweden by focusing on the impact of market size and regional hierarchy while controlling for several store and employee characteristics over time. The analysis utilizes Swedish store-level data for the years 2002-2008. To capture the urban-periphery interaction in retail markets, the analysis (i) uses an accessible market potential measure, which captures the impact of the potential demand both in close proximity in the region, and from outside the region separately, and (ii) investigates the stores that are located in central and non-central markets respectively. The results show an approximately 10 percent higher productivity premium associated with the market size in close proximity for centrally located independent stores, whereas regional market size is found to play an equally important role for both stores located in central markets and stores located in peripheral markets. The findings also show that employee characteristics do not contribute to the productivity of stores in central markets but that small but significant productivity returns are captured for stores located in peripheral markets. The differences in the impact arising from the market potential measures highlight the importance of taking the spatial continuum and regional hierarchy into account in an examination of the market size-productivity relationship for retailers.

This paper investigates the impact of market accessibility on productivity, where market potential is calculated in terms of the time-distances between market places of different aggregation levels, and wage sums in the respective markets. In particular, the empirical analysis explores the productivity in retail sector where overall economy is used as a benchmark. Analysis is conducted for central and peripheral market places separately to see whether there is a notable variation implying an urban-periphery structure when it comes to the impact of market size on productivity in the Swedish economy. Retail sector is in the focus of the study because it is constituted by economic activities that are highly dependent on proximity to demand and density in the market place. Consequently, following the theoretical foundation on productivity returns to scale and density, one can expect an higher impact in the retail sector compared to the rest of the economy. Based on this proposition, this paper provides an empirical investigation where individual earnings in the entire economy are investigated first on establishment level and on individual level. Several characteristics of establishments, the economic milieu and individuals are taken into consideration in the empirical design. This paper contributes to the existing literature by introducing an overall retail productivity analysis where the entire economy is in question. Instead of examining retail trade in terms of geographically aggregate measures, and sector specific output measures that are not easy to compare across industries, paper treats individual earnings as a proxy for productivity which enables for an in-depth comparative analysis.