Moving home again? Never! The locational choices of graduates in Sweden

Two major challenges in Europe’s rural areas are an aging population and the diminishing share of human capital. While this pattern has been occurring for a long time, the effects are becoming acutely visible and impactful. The long-term loss of younger individuals has in many ways “drained” the labor market and the economic market power of rural areas. This is the context of our research: the locational choice of university graduates from an urban–rural perspective. Using micro data covering the entire Swedish population, we identify all university graduates from the year 2001. We analyze them with respect to whether they live in a rural or urban region before starting university and where they live after graduation at two points in time: 5 and 10 years. We use a series of multinomial logit regressions to determine what factors affect their short-term and long-term choices of location. We find that having children is one of the most influential factors for moving back home after graduation, irrespective of type of region. We find only minor differences between the two time perspectives.