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This paper explores the influence of spatial mobility on the risk of overeducation of French young workers. Mobilizing a survey following a cohort of young graduates entering the labour market from 2010 until 2013, our results reveal that interregional migration decreases the risk of (statistical and subjective) overeducation. We also evidence that migration to an economic centre (the Paris region) has an even stronger negative effect and that more educated workers benefit more from spatial mobility. These results are robust to controlling for self‐selection and the endogeneity of migration, as well as to various specifications of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests for convergence in labour productivity at the local level in 10 sub‐Saharan countries, disaggregated into 1136 administrative entities. This work combines nighttime lights data and a unique set of population censuses to produce local measures of growth, employment and sectoral shares. We find evidence of unconditional convergence across sectors in the range of 2%. However, convergence is heterogeneous and conditional on both manufacturing and services employment shares. Convergence is also associated with proximity to the main city, moderate population density, low land suitability and relatively moderate temperature. Finally, the within effect dominates the between effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines empirically the economic relationship between local labour market size and firm returns to training. Anchoring in the literature of micro‐foundation of agglomeration economies, we suspect that this relation is driven by two mechanisms: (i) labour pooling which should positively influence the returns to training through matching and learning effects and (ii) the risk of labour poaching, which tends to reduce the returns to training in larger labour markets. Our estimates, based on a large sample of French industrial firms, reveal that returns to training are increasing with the labour market size, suggesting that labour pooling dominates labour poaching effects. On average, returns to training lie between 6.7 and 7.7%, more in line with the microeconomic literature on education than previous studies focusing on training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge‐intensive services firms prefer to locate in cities that provide access to rich information flows and abundant opportunities for learning‐by‐recruiting. Focusing specifically on such locations, this paper explores how innovation is associated with work experiences "collected" by employees through their recent career paths and the implementation by current employer firms of practices to manage knowledge. Strong complementarities are found using a unique Norwegian dataset: The statistical association between practices and innovation outcomes depends strongly on variety of experience‐knowledge among employees. Conversely, while said variety does not affect innovation in the absence of dedicated practices, it strongly does in their presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functional regions capturing local socioeconomic dynamics are a framework for territorial statistics and policy‐making. The usefulness of such statistics and policies depends on the adequateness of the regions used in the analysis. Several authors have adopted the modularity quality function to drive their regionalization methods. This function, originally devised for non‐spatial data, has limitations particularly relevant in this context. The paper discusses these limitations and illustrate them using real data for the United States. The results warn against using standard modularity to assess or optimize the quality of a functional delineation, and advocate for available alternatives that consider the spatial nature of functional regionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we explore the role of agglomeration economies on unemployment‐to‐work transition rates in French employment areas. Mobilizing administrative exhaustive data files from individuals registered at the employment agency, we estimate local transition rates that are independent of differences in local characteristics of job seekers. Then, observed disparities between areas are explained by population density, our measure for agglomeration effects, and some demographic and labor market characteristics. We retain econometrics models considering spatial dependency for our dependent variable but also endogeneity of our main variable of interest. We find a negative relationship between population density and unemployment to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our empirical analysis focuses on the effect of regional policies on migration attraction factors in Europe. We employ a regression discontinuity design to assess the causal relationship between the reception of large amounts of public funds and migration flows in the EU‐15 regions. In highly‐subsidised regions, we find a large increase in the share of foreign citizens from less‐developed countries when compared to low‐subsidised regions with similar pre‐treatment characteristics. The analysis shows that such an increase is due to the positive impact of the European regional policy on job market opportunities as well as the improvement of public goods supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1970s, it was argued that shifts from relatively smaller to larger youth cohorts in the labor force raise the unemployment rate. In contrast, using US state‐level data, two studies come to a contrary conclusion. I provide a theoretical framework for local labor markets that considers age cohort differences in labor market characteristics. Using a spatial panel data model and US county‐level data (2000–2014), the estimates provide strong evidence that aging of the working‐age population reduces overall unemployment by almost 1 percentage point. Long‐run effects that consider local feedbacks are even larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]