SMEs that grow rapidly for three consecutive years or more contribute greatly to local job creation, posing questions on whether their mobility has implications for local employment and SME growth policies. This paper asks whether high-growth SMEs are more likely to move between metropolitan, urban and rural labour markets than other SMEs using Italian firm-level data for 2004-2018. It documents that firm mobility is relatively rare: only about 1% of firms and 1.5% of high-growth scalers relocate their headquarters to a different local labour market. The greater mobility of high-growth scalers compared to other firms is largely driven by moves between metropolitan labour markets.
