Best Paper Award at Uddevalla Symposium

Associate professor in Economics Johan Klaesson and doctoral candidate Sofia Wixe won the Best Paper Award at the 14th Uddevalla Symposium in Bergamo, Italy in June.

The title of the paper is "Skills, Education and Productivity - Firm Level Evidence on the Presence of Externalities". The paper is empirical and discusses how the characteristics of a certain municipality can explain the productivity of Swedish companies in the manufacturing industry. The authors have studied the industrial structure in the municipalities, if it is specialized or diversified, the degree of competition, and the quality of labour market matching. The study is unique since it includes labour-specific properties to see whether the effect of externalities differ depending on the type of workforce at the companies.

The Uddevalla Symposium is held in different locations each year, and the purpose is to bring together academic scholars, researchers and insightful practitioners from various fields within business administration and management, e.g. the fields of international business, regional economics, political science and sociology in order to increase knowledge related to “Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Functional Regions".