Umeå universitets logga

While the family may serve as a resource for entrepreneurs, it has been studied separately in different disciplines. In this paper, we combine the arguments on familial relationships (family firm literature) and skill variety (regional learning literature) to analyse how different forms of entrepreneurial family relationships (co-occurrences) facilitate firm performance, and how familial relationships moderate the effects of skill variety on firm performance. Using longitudinal data (2002-2012) on a sample of privately owned firms with up to 50 employees with matched information on all employees, our results show that entrepreneur children relationship is the dominant dyad familial relationship in family firms. The fixed effects estimates demonstrate that entrepreneurial family relationships do affect firm performance but that this is dependent on the type of familial relationship. Children and spouses show a positive relationship with firm performance while siblings of the entrepreneur show no significant relationship with performance. The estimates further indicate that familial relationships involving spouses abate the negative effects of having too similar or too different types of skills. The paper thus contributes to new knowledge regarding not only whether family relationships matter for performance, but also in what way they matter.

Forestland is a tangible asset, likely both indicating and creating attachment to the forest site for the owners. Forest ownership can both create and maintain a strong motive for developing the forest holding and its surroundings. Decisions made by non-industrial private forest (NIPF) owners can therefore be expected to influence population development in the local communities. This paper addresses forest owners' migration propensity, and whether forest ownership influences migration to and from the municipality where the forest holding is located. Comparing the non-forest owners to the group of local NIPF owners, we found that the latter are more sedentary. Forest owners living in their forest municipalities seldom move out – about a third annually compared to others in the same age group. When moving, about half of absentee forest owners select their forest municipality as their destination and thus become local forest owners. Although private forest ownership significantly contributes to population development in small, remote rural municipalities, policies for local and rural development rarely acknowledge the potential private forest owners represent for economic and population development in rural areas.

This study explores the magnitude and composition of kinship ties at Swedish workplaces. By analysing official register data and illustrating findings from interviews with HR personnel at different workplaces, the following questions are discussed: How much kinship concentration is there today on the labour market in a modern Western society such as Sweden? How is the kin‐based selection of workplace members structured by place? The study is based on an analysis of individually connected register information on all workplaces in Sweden in 2012. The number of individual links between relatives and couples at an average workplace amounts to 14% of the number of employees as derived from 310, 000 couples and pairs of relatives among 4.3 million workers. So, even today in Sweden, kinship is a common phenomenon observable for most workers at most workplaces. Of all such connected pairs of kin at workplaces, more than a third contain counterparts living in the same household. A non‐linear individual‐level regression reveals that population density in the vicinity of the workplace is substantially related to kin density. Large agglomerations seem to coexist with low kin density workplaces. Although some level of kin membership is unavoidable especially at workplaces in sparsely populated places, removing this part still reveals that kinship above an unavoidable level seems to exist. The study contributes to the discussion of kinship in workplaces by examining the magnitude and composition of kinship ties in the whole work force and complementing findings with interviews.

More than half of the forest land in Europe is privately owned, and ownership structure is known to have implications for management, production of timber and other forest products and services that support the transformation towards a green economy. This chapter provides examples of how we can gain knowledge about the forest and forest owner/user relationship from a structural point of view. Sweden is taken as an example because of the accessibility of continuous data on forest conditions, ownership and demographic data. It is concluded that the pace of change in ownership structure and forest management behaviour is slow. Further, neither the ongoing migration, urbanisation, ageing population nor the increased proportion of women seems to reduce the willingness to manage and harvest.

This study aims to develop a typology of generic meeting places based on social contact and mixing of relevance for infectious disease transmission. Data was collected by means of a contact diary survey conducted on a representative sample of the Swedish population. The typology is derived from a cluster analysis accounting for four dimensions associated with transmission risk: visit propensity and its characteristics in terms of duration, number of other persons present and likelihood of physical contact. In the analysis, we also study demographic, socioeconomic and geographical differences in the propensity of visiting meeting places. The typology identifies the family venue, the fixed activity site, the family vehicle, the trading plaza and the social network hub as generic meeting places. The meeting place typology represents a spatially explicit account of social contact and mixing relevant to infectious disease modelling where the social context of the outbreak can be highlighted in light of the actual infectious disease.

Workplaces are one of the most important regular meeting places in society. The aim of this study was to use simulation experiments to examine the impact of different workplace cultures on influenza dissemination during pandemics. The impact is investigated by experiments with defined social-mixing patterns at workplaces using semi-virtual models based on authentic sociodemographic and geographical data from a North European community (population 136 000). A simulated pandemic outbreak was found to affect 33% of the total population in the community with the reference academic-creative workplace culture; virus transmission at the workplace accounted for 10·6% of the cases. A model with a prevailing industrial-administrative workplace culture generated 11% lower incidence than the reference model, while the model with a self-employed workplace culture (also corresponding to a hypothetical scenario with all workplaces closed) produced 20% fewer cases. The model representing an academic-creative workplace culture with restricted workplace interaction generated 12% lower cumulative incidence compared to the reference model. The results display important theoretical associations between workplace social-mixing cultures and community-level incidence rates during influenza pandemics. Social interaction patterns at workplaces should be taken into consideration when analysing virus transmission patterns during influenza pandemics.

Simulation is an important resource for studying the dynamics of pandemic influenza and predicting the potential impact of interventions. However, there are several challenges for the design of such simulator architectures. Specifically, it is difficult to develop simulators that combine flexibility with run-time performance. This tradeoff is problematic in the pandemic-response setting because it makes it challenging to extend and adapt simulators for ongoing situations where rapid results are indispensable.

Simulation architectures based on aspect-oriented programming can model specific concerns of the simulator and can allow developers to rapidly extend the simulator in new ways without sacrificing run-time performance. It is possible to use such aspects in conjunction with separate simulation models, which define community, disease, and intervention properties. The implication of this research for pandemic response is that aspects can add a novel layer of flexibility to simulation environments, which enables modelers to extend the simulator run-time component to new requirements that go beyond the original modeling framework.

The paper investigates the importance of spatial scale for changes in earnings at the workplace by using spatial regression applied to workplace-level micro data in an exploratory purpose. A floating grid technique is used to define equal-sized workplaces and their daily-reach surrounding zones as divided into three spatial entities: working-square, local area and hinterland. On the basis of geo-referenced information on workplaces and places of residence along with numerous individual-level socio-economic indicators, the results of the regression models reveal that the indicators of the daily-reach area play a dominant role and that their contribution varies over spatial entities. Among the spatial entities, the working-square (km square) surrounding the workplace is more important than the workplace itself, the local area and the hinterland. Moreover, the results suggest that internal factors related to population size, diversity of trade and industry and educational level contribute to about one-third of changes in work income at the workplace level. It can be concluded that knowledge, learning and human capital are strongly associated with increased earnings.

Le document étudie l'importance de l'échelle spatiale dans l'évolution des gains sur le lieu de travail, en utilisant la régression spatiale appliquée au niveau des micro-données sur les lieux de travail dans un but exploratoire. Une technique à grille flottante est utilisée pour définir les lieux de travail de taille égale et leurs zones d'accès quotidiens environnantes jour- divisée en trois entités spatiales: le km² de travail, la zone locale et l'arrière-pays. Sur la base des informations géo-référencées sur les lieux de travail et les lieux de résidence ainsi que de nombreux indicateurs socio-économiques au niveau individuel, les résultats des modèles de régression révèlent que les indicateurs de la zone d'accès quotidien jouent un rôle dominant et que leur contribution varie selon les entités spatiales. Parmi les entités spatiales, le travail-carré (km carré) entourant le lieu de travail est plus important que le lieu de travail lui-même, la région et l'arrière-pays. En outre, les résultats suggèrent que des facteurs internes liés à la taille de la population, la diversité du commerce et de l'industrie et le niveau d'éducation contribuent à environ un tiers des changements dans le revenu de travail au niveau du lieu de travail. On peut en conclure que la connaissance, l'apprentissage et le capital humain sont fortement associés à l'augmentation du bénéfice.