Housing, labour market conditions and regional migration

Sammanfattning: Essay 1: Swedish micro and macro data on internal migration indicate that home-owners on average have a higher propensity to migrate to other labour market areas in response to higher unemployment and job vacancy rates than renters and tenant-owners. This is evidence that owning your home does not constrain labour mobility across labour market areas in comparison to other forms of housing tenure. The response to high local job vacancy rates indicates that migration in general is driven by differences in matching efficiency in local labour market areas rather than a pure response to high local unemployment. A third finding is that at higher levels of aggregation high unemployment is associated to high levels of home-ownership as previous researchers have found. The suggested explanation for this correlation, i.e. that home-ownership constrains mobility of individuals, however, seems falsified in Sweden by our results.Essay 2: Swedish micro and macro data on internal migration indicate that interregional migration responds to regional labour market conditions and individual unemployment. Migration is found to go from relatively high unemployment and high job vacancy to low unemployment and low job vacancy regions contrary to earlier research. The response to job vacancy rates indicate that migration responds to differences in local Beveridge curves and migration goes towards better matching efficiency. Unemployment on the individual level is found to increases the propensity for interregional migration.