Home, Job and Space : Mapping and Modeling the Labor Market

Sammanfattning: How does space affect individuals’ outcome on the labor market? And how do we measure it? Beyond the notion of the labor market as a system of supply and demand, lays a society of individuals and workplaces, whose relationships are undeniably complex. This thesis aims to shed some new light on how to investigate and analyze the complex labor market relationships from a spatial perspective.In this thesis, five self-contained articles describe the spatial relationship between individuals and workplaces. In the first article, the official delineation of local labor market areas is tested against the delineation of labor markets for different subgroups. Differences in the regionalization are discussed from the subgroups’ and municipals’ perspective.In the second article, two sources of bias in the computation of local labor market areas, and suggestions how to reduce them, are presented.In the third article the spatial mismatch hypothesis is tested and confirmed on a refugee population in Sweden.In articles four and five, a new model for the estimation of job accessibility is introduced and evaluated. The model, ELMO, is created to answer to the need for a new accessibility measure to be used in spatial mismatch related research. The usability of the model is validated through empirical tests, were the ELMO-model excels in comparison to the accessibility models it is tested against.