Theme C: Co-location: Labour Market Effects and Knowledge Sharing Institutions WORKING THROUGH KNOWLEDGE POOLS: LABOUR MARKET DYNAMICS, THE TRANSFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE AND IDEAS, AND INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS

This article explores the ICT (information and communications technology) cluster in the Swedish capital Stockholm and its surrounding region:. In particular, the article focuses on the issue of the extent to which it is the labour market and labour mobility that are the most likely channels for local and extra-local sources of knowledge and ideas. Thus the article positions itself against a growing literature that focuses on rather diffuse and vague notions that knowledge and innovation reside ‘in the air ’ or in the ‘buzz ’ of urban life. Instead the underlying hypothesis is that in many sectors and industries such things as a cosmopolitan street life or accidental face-to-face encounters play relatively little part in the flow of experiences, knowledge and innovation. Rather it is in the workplace that these exchanges and flows are located and it is thus through labour mobility that intra-cluster exchanges occur. The article tests such ideas in relation to the ICT cluster and the Stockholm region using a uniquely detailed time series data set. The data set used is based on official taxation and civil registration records and contains complete details on everything from education to career changes to income levels for every individual resident in Sweden. The detail of the individual records and the complete nature of the data set mean that it offers a unique possibility to examine, on a large scale, th