We also find that regions with higher rates of skill-related job switches see better economic outcomes. This underscores the importance of skill transferability and the power of dynamic labour markets in regional development. 9/9

While most Swedish municipalities exhibit above-average skill-coherence, regions with more diverse skill structures often have higher education levels and stronger economic performance. This points to the potential benefits of unrelated variety! 8/9

We find that workers do tend to switch more often between jobs with similar skill requirements. This strengthens the widespread use of labour flows to approximate human capital transferability between economic activities! 7/9

We visualise the job-job skill-relatedness as a network in which the clustering of both occupations (top) and industries (bottom) are evident. 6/9

We introduce a job-postings-based measure of skill-relatedness that is not reliant on labour mobility. An openly available job-job relatedness matrix accompanies the paper (see at link below)! 5/9

doi.org/10.17605/OSF...

Focusing on #Sweden, we combine job ads with register data to analyse the skill-similarity of jobs (industry-occupation combos), the coherence of local skill portfolios, and how these factors link to regional development at a granular spatial scale. 4/9

We argue that job ad data is a largely untapped opportunity to revisit old findings, overcome empirical bottlenecks, and pose new questions in regional research on skills. It allows us to refine and expand how we study skill-related dynamics. 3/9

Skills can be hard to define, identify, measure - yet almost everyone agrees on their crucial role in regional development. Our paper shows how large-scale job ad data can offer fresh insights into this “mystery”. 2/9