Migration, Occupational Mobility, and Regional Escalators in Scotland

This paper seeks to unpick the complex relationship between an individual’s migration behaviour, their place of residence, and their occupational performance in the Scottish labour market between 1991 and 2001. We investigate whether Edinburgh has emerged as an occupational escalator region and whether individuals moving there experience more rapid upward occupational mobility than those living and moving elsewhere. Using country of birth, we also control for an individual’s propensity to make long distance moves during earlier periods of their life course. Using data from the Scottish Longitudinal Study, linking 1991 and 2001 individual census records, and logistic regressions, we show that those who migrate over long distances within or to Scotland are most likely to achieve upward occupational mobility. We also found that Edinburgh is by far the most important regional escalator in Scotland; those moving to Edinburgh are the most likely to experience upward occupational mobility from low to high occupational status jobs. This is an important finding as most of the literature on escalator regions focuses on international mega cities. 1. Introduction Although Fielding [1–3] was not the first to hypothesise that a stay in large metropolitan regions is beneficial to labour careers, he was the first to frame this idea in dynamic terms when he coined the term “escalator region.” The escalator hypothesis posits that escalator regions offer labour market opportunities that other regions do not offer and as a result propel the careers of in-migrants at a faster rate than other regions [4]. In the three-stage model of the escalator region, young people move to these regions, then advance their careers, and step-off the escalator later in life when they move out of the region. Fielding tested, and broadly confirmed, his hypothesis for London’s extended metro region using data from 1971 and 1991. Since the conception of the escalator region hypothesis by Fielding, many studies have followed (see [5] for an excellent overview of the literature), and all of them confirm that a stay in a large metropolitan region has positive effects on careers. There is less clarity on the causal mechanism underlying this finding, and the escalator concept has also received criticism (see also [4, 6]). Does the escalator region offer exceptional opportunities, or do in-migrants have certain characteristics which cause them to do better than others? In the first case, you would expect that also those who were born and stay in such regions benefit. Gordon [7] recently investigated