Ascending from the bottom rung: The labor market assimilation of rural-urban migrants in Sweden, 1880–1910
研究了1880-1910年瑞典工业化时期，农村移民进入城市后的劳动力市场表现，发现男性移民起初收入差距大，随时间缩小但未完全追上，女性则几乎没有趋同迹象。
This article examines the assimilation of rural-born people into the urban economy in the industrialization context, focusing on Sweden from 1880 to 1910—a time characterized by a notable shift in economic activity towards urban areas. I utilize individual-level data on three cohorts of rural-urban migrants linked across census records, allowing for an examination of their labor market assimilation across all Swedish towns. The main findings suggest that the labor market assimilation of male migrants followed a Chiswick-like process, regardless of the size of the destination area. Initially, migrants displayed a sizeable negative gap in labor market outcomes compared to urban natives, which narrowed with the time spent in the urban area. Nevertheless, they never managed to close the gap over time. By contrast, female migrants displayed few signs of converging with female natives. Migrants’ inability to close the gap was likely due to the non-transferability of skills between the rural and urban sectors. The convergence that did occur can be explained by the potential for upward mobility from the relatively low initial positions migrants entered and, to some extent, negative selection into return migration.