Job access and the spatial mobility trajectories of higher education graduates in the Netherlands

The successfulness of the transition from education into working life is
closely related to further career success. Graduates with good access to jobs earn higher wages and have lower chances of being unemployed. Access to jobs at the start of the career is therefore an important determinant of early career success and of importance for the whole career. In this paper, we study the effect of job access on the mobility patterns of recent higher education graduates. We use a GIS to calculate a job accessibility index based on driving time and use sequence analysis to create spatial mobility histories for 13,621 recent graduates of higher education. We subsequently relate job access at the start of the career to spatial mobility histories to analyze whether a suboptimal starting location in terms of job access leads to differing spatial mobility trajectories. Finally, we analyze how job access and spatial mobility influence labor market outcomes.