Labour mobility aligns unevenly with occupational skill similarity across social groups and local labour markets - Replication code and data

This repository provides the replication code and derived data for: Tóth, G., Elekes, Z., & Eriksson, R. Labour mobility aligns unevenly with occupational skill similarity across social groups and local labour markets. [Journal citation to be added on publication.] Workers cannot move through labour markets as freely as their skills would imply. This study combines Swedish population-wide employer–employee register data with roughly 700,000 job advertisements to construct an occupation space in which links capture skill similarity measured independently of labour mobility, and compares it with directed worker flows across occupations, social groups (gender, education, country of birth), and Sweden's 72 local labour markets. Mobility follows skill-related pathways strongly, with instrumental-variable estimates supporting a causal effect of skill similarity on labour flows. Occupational segregation nonetheless structures access to these pathways unevenly across social groups, and local labour markets where mobility aligns more closely with skill relatedness show better economic outcomes: higher incomes, greater occupational diversity, faster re-employment, smaller gender wage gaps, and lower rates of workers leaving the local labour market. Contents: one self-contained folder per table/figure, each holding its own data, R script, and output — 01Table (Table 1: skill relatedness and labour mobility, incl. 2SLS), 02Figure (occupation space network), 03Figure (skill relatedness × demographic similarity interaction plots), 04Figure (ROC curves by social group), 05Figure (regional ROC curves, AUC distribution, map, and coefficient plot), plus a shared functions.r with common plotting/data-prep functions. Data availability: Individual-level Statistics Sweden register microdata cannot be shared and must be requested directly from Statistics Sweden / the ASTRID Lab, Umeå University. JobTech job-advertisement data and O*NET data (used as an instrument) are both public and not duplicated here. Please cite the published article when using this code or data.