The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Mikko Silliman (Aalto University) for this session.
Mikko Silliman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Aalto University and the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics.
His research examines the intersection of education policy and labor economics, focusing on the forces that drive inequality. He studies how education systems and labor markets can reduce these disparities and support employment as the nature of work continues to change.
Event Topic:
Multidimensional skills and spatial sorting
We study the multi-dimensional spatial sorting of individuals across time. Data from the Finnish Defence Forces spanning the near universe of the male population exhibit a striking set of patterns. Men living in cities today exhibit 0.6 standard deviations higher levels of cognitive skills than their peers living in rural areas. After we re-assign people to their municipality of birth, this association attenuates, and if we re-assign people to their parents’ place of birth, skill levels across place are further reduced. Similar patterns extend beyond cognitive skills to socio-emotional skills often associated with personality, such as extraversion and conscientiousness. We develop a dynamic model of spatial sorting across multi-dimensional skills to capture the relative roles of sorting and place effects in explaining these patterns. To inform this model, we provide reduced-form estimates of place effects across different dimensions of skills, estimates of returns to different dimensions of skills across place, and estimates of intergenerational persistence across different dimensions of skills.
Event Details:
Date: 24 April 2026
Time: 13:30–14:45
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
If you have any questions or need further information, feel free to contact us using the form or email us at [email protected]
