Viktor Venhorst

Moving Shop: Residential and Business Relocation by the Highly Educated Self-employed

Abstract This study addresses the locational puzzle concerning the optimization of firm and residential locations faced by highly educated self-employed entrepreneurs. In contrast to employees, the self-employed have considerable leverage in changing their firm location, which gives them an additional option—apart from a residential move—to resolve household locational issues. Two results stand out. First, firms are generally located very close to the residential location. This reinforces the idea that entrepreneurship is a local event. Second, if other economic activities need to be considered, firm relocation is often used to resolve the locational puzzle.

Transitions and Location Choice: Analysing the Decisions of Students and Recent Graduates

Abstract This special issue is the result of a series of sessions on graduates and the labour market, organised at the 2012 ERSA conference in Bratislava, Slovakia. The collection of papers is the first to address determinants and impact of decisions on both entry and exit from higher education, with a focus on the location and labour market decisions of students and recent graduates. The first two papers in this issue present novel analyses of the transition from high school to tertiary education; Suhonen on distance and field of study in Finland; and Faggian and Franklin on student quality and location choice in the USA. The following two articles focus on the migration patterns of recent graduates; Ahlin, Andersson and Thulin focus on the rewards of entering labour markets in urban areas, while Carree and Kronenberg focus on the issue of residential location choice. Koster and Venhorst conclude by studying the residential and business location decisions of graduate entrepreneurs. The papers provide policy implications on the geographical spread of higher education institutions and the short- and long-term consequences of student and graduate mobility.

Economic linkages between urban and rural regions – what’s in it for the rural?

ABSTRACT Urban–rural interdependences are modelled based on wages, cost of living, and interregional migration and commuting. Rural-to-urban commuting generates a scenario where the relative level of urban wages can continue to outperform rural wages without residential migration and increased costs of living acting as equilibrating forces. The spread of urban workers could be detrimental for rural regions without clear mechanisms for their human and financial capital to penetrate local economies. Therefore, ‘what’s in it for the rural?’ depends upon the ability of rural regions to capture the value attached to highly mobile, skilled workers choosing to live in the rural region.

Entry into working life: Internal migration and the job match quality of higher-educated graduates

We estimate the impact of internal migration on job-match quality for recent Dutch university and college graduates. We find positive yet modest wage returns. After controlling for the self-selection of migrants with an IV approach, this effect is no longer significant for university graduates and all graduates from peripheral areas. We also find that, for our alternative job-match measures, where there is evidence of migrant self-selection, controlling for self-selection strongly reduces the effect of internal migration on job-match quality. In some cases, the returns on internal migration are found to be negative, which may signal forced migration.

Der grenzüberschreitende Arbeitsmarkt der Niederlande mit Deutschland und Belgien: Jenseits von Romantik

Das niederlandische Verwaltungs- und Politikinteresse fur den grenzuberschreitenden Arbeitsmarkt steht im krassen Gegensatz zu einem Mangel an empirischen Daten uber die tatsachlichen Arbeitsmarktprobleme auf beiden Seiten der Grenze. Die Arbeitslosenquoten in niederlandischen Grenzregionen sind hoher als auf der anderen Seite in Deutschland, aber das bedeutet nicht zwangslaufig, dass es fur niederlandische Arbeitslose geeignete offene Stellen in Deutschland gibt, und dass grenzuberschreitendes Pendeln zur Losung des Problems beitragen kann. Obwohl das Potenzial grenzuberschreitender Arbeitsmarkte, die von Agglomerationswirtschaften profitieren, sicherlich in einigen Grenzregionen besteht, hat der tatsachliche Pendlerstrom in Wirklichkeit einen niedrigen und zeitlich konstanten Umfang. Daruber hinaus ist das Pendeln aus Deutschland um ein Vielfaches hoher als das Pendeln aus den Niederlanden, was darauf hindeutet, dass die Beschaftigungsmoglichkeiten fur Deutsche in den Niederlanden besser sind als umgekehrt. Wir fordern einen realistischeren Ansatz, der auf Fakten zu Problemen auf den regionalen Arbeitsmarkten, evidenzbasierter Bewertung der politischen Initiativen und gemeinsamen Masnahmen beider Lander und der Abstimmung (Dualitat) von Strategien im Ansatz basiert, um den potenziellen Nutzen vermehrter Interaktionen zwischen grenzuberschreitenden Arbeitsmarkten auszuschopfen.

Editorial: New Frontiers in Interregional Migration Research

Research on interregional migration has taken great strides in the last decades. Data quality has improved considerably, with micro-level data increasingly available. This has allowed researchers to link substantive background data, pertaining to a broad variety of life domains, to information on past migration trajectories, as well as current movements. Such data is now not only available for Western economies, but also for some developing and transition economies.