Regional patterns of the recruitment of foreign labour: Matching foreign labour and spatial sorting in Denmark

In recent years, foreign labour has become an essential issue in Western Europe. Recent research suggests that foreign labour has implications for regional growth patterns and employment opportunities of native workers. Yet, few studies go into the dimension of the regional determinants of recruitment of foreign labour underlying these regional growth effects. Therefore, this paper considers determinants of the regional location of foreign labour. Specifically, we investigate the role of social networks for the spatial distribution of work permits in the context of the Danish regions. We first investigate motives for recruiting foreign labour by analysing the particular case of Southern Denmark relying on recently collected employer survey data with roughly 2,000 records. We also analyse on regional differences in work permits across all Danish regions.