Recent Publications

The Just City in the Arctic

Published in The Routledge Handbook of Arctic Governance (in press), 2025

The topic of urban justice has been discussed mostly within the context of large urban agglomerations in developed and developing countries alike while arctic urbanities have been left out of the debate. How would the quest for the just (small) city happen in the Arctic? Democratic deliberation, a respect for diversity, and the eradication of oppression are all keystones of justice in urban planning, but their implementation is also context dependent. This chapter outlines the specificities of the arctic context that are relevant to the pursuit of justice in urban planning while also highlighting some emerging issues for the region.

The Transferability of Human Capital and Migrant Incorporation Strategies in the Swedish Labor Market: A Sequence Analysis

Published in International Migration Review, 2025

Migrants benefit differently from their educational credentials depending on their origin. We use the case of Sweden to study the strategies that migrants adopt to overcome barriers keeping them from fully using their education in the host society’s labor market. We used administrative register data on employment, self-employment, unemployment, parental leave, and education to classify nine-year-long labor-market sequences of a cohort of migrants. Optimal matching and cluster analysis yielded five sequence types from which incorporation strategies can be inferred. We studied how institutional barriers to the transferability of human capital moderate the association between education and sequence type. We found that the association between education and the probability of each labor market sequence type depended on the institutional dissimilarity between origin and host country, even when linguistic dissimilarity and cultural dissimilarity were accounted for. Favored by supranational institutional arrangements that standardize educational credentials, migrants whose origin country was a member of what later became the European Higher Education Area avoided inactivity by converting their human capital into early employment. In contrast, highly educated migrants from other parts of the world tended to first obtain Swedish educational credentials before entering the labor market. Strategies based on self-employment were not related to education regardless of migrant origin and resulted in much lower earnings. Our findings show that differences in the transferability of human capital can produce diverse incorporation outcomes by shaping which strategies migrants adopt to navigate the context of reception.

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Migrant residential mobility and tenure transitions within different housing regimes: evidence from three Nordic capital cities

Published in Housing Studies, 2024

Migrant housing-related disadvantages and residential segregation are both important concerns in migrant-receiving countries. However, there exists little understanding about the connection between the two. According to the spatial assimilation framework, migrants who establish themselves in the labour market and experience income increase tend to move to higher-income neighbourhoods. However, migrant opportunities to rent or buy an apartment may vary across cities due to each city having its own distinctive housing regimes, along with related tenure structures, as emphasised by the housing availability framework. Different opportunity structures may lead to different pathways of spatial assimilation, as moving into a higher-income neighbourhood does not necessarily entail becoming a homeowner, and vice versa. The main findings of our comparative and longitudinal study reveal that different pathways of spatial assimilation indeed do arise in cities which have different housing regimes, as has been proposed by the housing availability framework.

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New immigration destinations in Sweden: Migrant residential trajectories intersecting rural areas

Published in Sociologia Ruralis, 2023

This paper aims to examine the residential trajectories of immigrants that intersect rural areas in Sweden. It adds to the literature on new immigration destinations (NIDs) and addresses the need to include migration routes intersecting rural areas, immigrants’ secondary migration patterns and temporal dimensions of migration, as well as the multiplicity of migrants in such destinations. We examine whether NIDs have emerged in Sweden and immigrants’ subsequent internal mobility from such areas and its determinants. Employing sequence analysis to full-population register data, we identify typical migration pathways. According to the results, NIDs are an emerging phenomenon in rural and small-sized cities in Sweden. We find limited support for the Swedish discourse that the diverse groups of rural migrants leave soon after arrival; also, those leaving are not doing so for labour market–related reasons, nor are they heading for metropolitan areas. We suggest that NIDs offer an important contribution to understanding migration patterns.

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From Sequences to Variables: Rethinking the Relationship between Sequences and Outcomes

Published in Sociological Methodology, 2023

Sequence analysis is increasingly used in the social sciences for the holistic analysis of life-course and other longitudinal data. The usual approach is to construct sequences, calculate dissimilarities, group similar sequences with cluster analysis, and use cluster membership as a dependent or independent variable in a regression model. This approach may be problematic, as cluster memberships are assumed to be fixed known characteristics of the subjects in subsequent analyses. Furthermore, it is often more reasonable to assume that individual sequences are mixtures of multiple ideal types rather than equal members of some group. Failing to account for uncertain and mixed memberships may lead to wrong conclusions about the nature of the studied relationships. In this article, the authors bring forward and discuss the problems of the “traditional” use of sequence analysis clusters as variables and compare four approaches for creating explanatory variables from sequence dissimilarities using different types of data. The authors conduct simulation and empirical studies, demonstrating the importance of considering how sequences and outcomes are related and the need to adjust analyses accordingly. In many typical social science applications, the traditional approach is prone to result in wrong conclusions, and similarity-based approaches such as representativeness should be preferred.

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Insider Out: Cross-National Differences in Foreign-Born Female Labor Force Participation in the United States, Sweden, and Japan

Published in International Migration Review, 2023

This article assesses the impact of household composition and intermarriage on foreign-born women’s labor force participation in Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Whereas previous literature on immigrant integration and intermarriage has treated social integration and labor force participation as tightly interlinked phenomena, we use new and previously unavailable data on Japan and the literature on institutional gender inequality to show that, in some cases, social integration through intermarriage might actually result in lower labor force participation for foreign-born women. We argue that the degree of institutional support for immigrants and families directly affects foreign-born women’s labor force participation in the anticipated direction for each country. We argue that these cross-national differences are largely an outcome of differences in the degree of institutional support for working women and families within the host society and help clarify instances where social integration might have negative implications for labor force participation. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for both gender and social context when assessing the role intermarriage plays in receiving country immigrant integration.

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Tract level associations between historical residential redlining and contemporary fatal encounters with police

Published in Social Science and Medicine, 2022

How does structural racism influence where people are killed during encounters with police? We analyzed geo-located incidents of fatal encounters with police that occurred between 2000 and 2020 in Census tracts that received a classification by the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930’s. Statistical models show that incidents of fatal encounters with police in formerly redlined areas are 66% more likely than in zones that received the most favorable “A” rating. These differences remain even when tract historical and contemporary racial compositions, along with contemporary economic conditions, are taken into account. The effects of contemporary racial composition and economic conditions overshadow the effect of zone classifications only in areas with high proportions of Black residents or residents in poverty (>60% or >30% respectively). These findings provide evidence of structural biases in policing rooted in historical segregation policies.

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Trajectories of Spatial Assimilation or Place Stratification? A Typology of Residence and Workplace Histories of Newly Arrived Migrants in Sweden

Published in International Migration Review, 2022

In most societies, resources and opportunities are concentrated in neighborhoods and workplaces occupied by the host population. The spatial assimilation and place stratification theories propose trajectories (the sequences of events) leading to minority and migrant access to or exclusion from these advantageous places. However, most previous research on these theories did not ask whether such theorized trajectories occur. We apply sequence analysis to decade-long residence and workplace histories of newly arrived migrants in Sweden to identify a typology of combined residence-work trajectories. The seven types of trajectories in our typology are characterized by varying degrees of proximity to the host population in residential neighborhoods and workplaces and by different patterns of change in such proximity over time. The pivotal role of socioeconomic gains in spatial assimilation, posited by the namesake theory, is not supported, as we do not find that migrant employment precedes residence alongside the host population. The importance of housing-market discrimination for migrants’ exclusion from host-dominated spaces, posited by place stratification theory, is only weakly supported, as we find that migrants from less affluent countries accumulate disadvantage over time, likely due to discrimination in both the labor and housing markets. Our findings also underscore the need for new theories explaining migrant residential outcomes which apply to contexts where migrant-dense neighborhoods are still forming.

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Global connections and the structure of skills in local co-worker networks

Published in Applied Network Science, 2020

Social connections that reach distant places are advantageous for individuals, firms and cities, providing access to new skills and knowledge. However, systematic evidence on how firms build global knowledge access is still lacking. In this paper, we analyse how global work connections relate to differences in the skill composition of employees within companies and local industry clusters. We gather survey data from 10% of workers in a local industry in Sweden, and complement this with digital trace data to map co-worker networks and skill composition. This unique combination of data and features allows us to quantify global connections of employees and measure the degree of skill similarity and skill relatedness to co-workers. We find that workers with extensive local networks typically have skills related to those of others in the region and to those of their co-workers. Workers with more global ties typically bring in less related skills to the region. These results provide new insights into the composition of skills within knowledge-intensive firms by connecting the geography of network contacts to the diversity of skills accessible through them.

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Migrants’ long-term residential trajectories in Sweden: persistent neighbourhood deprivation or spatial assimilation?

Published in Housing Studies, 2020

Despite time being a key element in the theories on international migrants’ socio-spatial mobility, it has not been sufficiently addressed in empirical research. Most studies focus on discrete transitions between different types of neighbourhoods, potentially missing theoretically important temporal aspects. This article uses sequence analysis to study the residential trajectories of international migrants in Sweden emphasising the timing, order, and duration of residence in neighbourhoods with different poverty levels. It follows individuals of the 2003 arrival cohort during their first 9 years in the country. Results show that 81% of migrants consistently reside in the same type of neighbourhood; 60% consistently live in a deprived area and mere 12% follow a trajectories starting at deprived and ending at middle-income or affluent neighbourhoods. Thus, spatial assimilation is neither the only nor the most frequent trajectory followed by migrants in Sweden. Lastly, there are persistent differences in neighbourhood attainment between immigrant groups, suggesting either place stratification or ethnic preference.

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